Working in the old fashion house is like how your parents raise you and give you this base, and you eventually grow up and have to say, "Well, you gave me this, but now I need to go my own way." So, more than finding a balance, it's about taking the good parts of what you've been given and bringing your own thing to it in order to take it all somewhere else - and hopefully, forward.

I spend tons of time on the music for the fashion shows. I work with this DJ, Jeremy Healy, and we do, like, four or five sessions during the week leading up to the show where we put the music together.

I think a lot of people, when they think about the house, they think of the print. But when people think about Emilio Pucci, I want them to think about this really, really hot girl, so my biggest job is to give her a face and an identity - and I do that by trying to associate that kind of print that people have in their minds with a kind of girl who is free-spirited, rebellious, a little bit rock 'n' roll, and who has a lot of energy, who is up.

I'm not intellectual at all as a designer. Whatever I'm into at the moment is usually what becomes the collection.

I think my biggest muses in fashion are probably rock 'n' roll girlfriends, like Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull and Bianca Jagger - and then maybe Patti Smith a bit as well.

For me, coming to a fashion house and bringing my love and respect to it - and, hopefully, earning the love and respect of the house - is the only way to do it. I think of it as my own house in that sense as well. So I like not working from a blank piece of paper. I like that there's something from the past, some kind of identity that I have to work with. There are these good ghosts around, these good energies that kind of reinforce what you do.

I'm incapable of functioning without music. I've always had it in my life. I played the violin when I was a kid, and my mother was a violinist at that point, so it's always been important to me in one way or another. When I work, there's always music cranking.