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.

If you buy a Cartier ring you want people to know it is a Cartier ring or a diamond, or a piece of art that's giving an emotion - then people read it and say, "wow that's really amazing". With prêt-à-porter you see people in the street, in a club, in a restaurant or whatever, and you think, "Oh my god, he's wearing my trousers!" In a way it's more open - people can put together the way they want - mixed with other designers.

I brought a lot of the codification of womenswear to menswear. Why? Because when I was a child, I was wearing women's clothes adjusted to me.

Most little children's obsessions are robots and Barbie dolls. My obsession as a kid was the Versace house. I used to save up my pocket money to buy Versus shirts. I was that obsessed!

I had only two girlfriends. I didn't have many friends because I was staying at home and dreaming - drawing and dreaming.

I didn't have many friends. I was very shy ... And, then, even worse, when I was 14 I became Gothic. I had long, black hair. I was going to school with makeup. Because I was trying to find my language, to scream to the world that I felt so closed in a box where I was living.

Couture is also a matter of respect. In the end, all of these women sewing and embroidering the clothes, whom are almost all my mother's age, they're all 70 or 80 years old, have been here for a lifetime. They spend hours on it and come up with solutions. And because it's on a catwalk, people see if for five seconds and don't even see the technique, the drapery.