Ralph Lauren has always stood for providing quality products, creating worlds and inviting people to take part in our dream. We were the innovators of lifestyle advertisements that tell a story and the first to create stores that encourage customers to participate in that lifestyle.

Sometimes when I walk into one of my own stores, I look at the display and say, "This looks so good - I want to buy it." Yet other times I walk in and the displays and mannequins will be all wrong, and I don't want to buy anything. When a customer walks into a store, she's looking for inspiration. So I'm tuned in to people, and I care about what they need and who they are.

I can drive a certain car one day with great pleasure, and the next day I'll be disappointed that the experience isn't as good as the day before. These cars have moods that change with the weather, or with the driver's own moods.

Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Thomas Edison I don't design clothes, I design dreams.

I don't like it when a woman looks like a fashion victim.

As a kid, I was always into clothes, but I didn't have the money to buy them. When I'd get my brothers' hand-me-downs, there was an energy in me that made me say, "I want to get my own things, to make my own statement." Somewhere along the line, that energy - coupled with my exposure, through movies, to a world I hadn't known - turned into something.

The clothes that I design and everything I've done is about life and how people live and how they want to live and how they dream they'll live. That's what I do.