It was time to come up here and retire with my wonderful husband, and my children and my grandchildren, and make that change. I'm not good at hanging on. When I make a decision to cut it off, I have to cut it off completely. I'm not good at, "Oh, I'll stick around and consult a little bit." I'm not good at that and I don't want to do that. I don't think you get anywhere doing that. I mean, I don't, although other people might. But that's not my personality. It's not my id. I have to make the break and be a good sport and adjust to it.

Strangely, meanness pays more than offering constructive and interesting commentary. Every season I think, "This is the last season. I'm not gonna read tomorrow morning. Forget it." The first thing when I wake up - quite late, usually - I am craving the newspaper.

I believe there is a moment growing up when you build your own mood board. You do a collage - you collect a few things, a few images that will be so important for your future choices. Not only aesthetic, or what you like for dressing, but your artistic choices. The room where I put papers and pictures and posters on the walls when I was a kid, it's still very strong in my head today. This movie poster or that portrait of a girl I took from a magazine, deep inside, is inspiration that comes back all the time.

You never do things thinking you will make a big statement. It just happens sometimes and you are lucky.

Couture has a lot of issues today. Here in Paris there are oddly so few houses showing. And I'm not talking about the style. I'm talking about the sense of couture and these young actresses that you were talking about - they want long dresses that are not always the most innovative or the most interesting. So it's a bit lost.

People usually forget that fashion designers are not artists, but there is an artistic side that is very strong in my point of view. At the same time, you have to be so organized and so serious. There are two aspects that are quite big contradictions, strangely, in what I'm doing.

I think what we're talking about is a sense of fashion as laboratory work. I mean, we are not scientific, of course, but we are looking for ideas all the time.