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.

The same spirit runs through everything I do.

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

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've always said that growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.

I don't think of myself as anyone special, and I would not know how to define myself.

Not only in the creative world but also in the sports world. The most successful achievers in sports are people that are really driven and have that spirit of hunger.