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.

Feeling free inside oneself is being free.

I don't feel too excited about fashion today People just want cheap fast clothes and are happy to look like everyone else

Fashion is not art. The aims of fashion and art are different and there is no need to compare them.

I make clothes for a woman who is not swayed by what her husband thinks.

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

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.