In spite of the fact that everyone thinks I am very much a rottweiler - that i am very dark and everything - I have a side that is very romantic that i show to very few people.

I can give a beautiful present, and that may change the lives of people around me.

I believe that couture is not about shocking.

When I started at 9, I was working with plaster. I worked with a florist. It was a little illegal for kids to work. They would give you tips because they couldn't really give you wages.

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.

I was the last one of nine kids - eight girls and me last - and my sisters were going out. They were teenagers. And as they were getting ready, I would sit on the bathtub and watch them put on makeup and transform themselves - you know, putting on clothes and giggling about the boys they were going to meet and everything. So for me, that was an amazing thing - the fact of transforming themselves.

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.