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.

I think the older I get, the more I realize that the ultimate luxury is time.

It's funny when I hear people complain - particularly about the most fabulous parts of being a designer, like when you're getting ready to work on a show. I don't even know that I'm tired. I could stay up for six days straight! No drugs, no coffee, no nothing. I'm just so excited.

I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?

My personal style icon is Steve McQueen. My design style icon is a mix of everyone from Jackie O. to Lauren Hutton to my mother.

Give me Caviar Kaspia and give me a hamburger. I love the two extremes.

People want to look taller and thinner. No one says, 'Ooh! Let me buy that dress because it makes me feel matronly!'