What you wear can largely govern your feelings and your emotions, and how you look influences the way people regard you. So fashion plays an important role on both the practical level and the aesthetic level of activity.

I am a clothes maker, and that's all I am. I only want to talk about the making of the clothes. I don't feel the need to go out there and explain that.

If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through. So it's self-given, but that's the only way, I think, to make a strong, good new creation.

I can't become naked for everybody. It's never going to be possible for the person to write the whole story completely, so I find bits of myself, bits of what I think in some articles. And I don't give lip service to journalists. I never make them feel comfortable. I say, "It's your job to make the story."

The same spirit runs through everything I do.

For me, creation can only come out of a certain kind of unhappiness. They say in Japan, this thing like the hungry spirit - the hungry mind - is what gets you going forward.

Fashion is something that you can attach to yourself, put on, and through that interaction, the meaning of it is born.