The craziest thing about fashion people in general, not just designers, is that it's always, "Oh my God, you lost weight! I love your hair!" Or "Oh, you're so tan!" Or, "You're so skinny! I love your shoes!" These are fashion icebreakers. Everyone's always looking at each other.

You make sexiness strong by balancing it out: something familiar with something unfamiliar, something masculine with something feminine, something streamlined with something rococo. It's a Yin and Yang. Women are made of layers, your mood shifts, no one is neither one extreme nor the other.

The best design teams are not people who are exactly the same...otherwise you're just sitting and telling, 'You're fabulous.' 'No, you're fabulous.'

When you try on something, you have to ask yourself, 'How many ways could I wear this? Could I wear it to work? To dinner or drinks? Will it span the seasons' If you have to think too hard about those questions, then skip it.

Fashion is not like the movie business, where you can have two great projects in a row and then say, "You know what? I'm going to take off eight months." What am I going to tell people? Wear last year's clothes?

Because of what's going on with the economy, I think women are realizing that maybe they don't need a closet full of clothes. They just need the right clothes.

You need to be curious one way or another as a designer. Your eye has to stay curious. I look at people and think about how they live. I think about bodies.