When I started, everyone said couture was finished and I was so scared. Actually I was more terrorized than scared. I was arriving from a provincial area of Italy. They called me in to do Givenchy and I just thought, Wow.

We are Italian. We are all little tribes - not only in fashion, but also in music - in everything, basically.

My great strength, which I very much believe in, is family. For me, family doesn't simply mean components of DNA. I mean family in the sense of siblings. My mom and my sisters are the energy and inspiration in my life.

It's super-essential. Even though I don't have a very big team, for me, the word muse may be démodé or not. I adore it, but I am also one, in my delirium, to be quite classical. For a designer - especially a male designer - he absolutely has to have that female voice by his side, which he listens to, he filters, he digests. It's a huge need, because when you see through the eyes of a man, you see a woman a certain way, and how they have little tricks of their own.

Being a creative mind, you have to examine who you are every day.

One thing my mom didn't want any of us to do was to cry or to complain about life. Every day and night, even when we didn't have much food, we would pray together. And that for me was a beautiful moment. The fact of being poor didn't really hurt me.

We didn't have a television, so we sat around the table, and me and my sisters and my mom would do these jobs, like, a penny for a piece, you know, these paper jobs. You know, what really saved me as a human today is my sisters and my mom.