Couture is emotion. Couture is freedom. Couture is not thinking about pricing and not thinking about craziness. You can do whatever you want to do in couture.

My luck has always been how I've had a family of women around me, and I have women who are very close to me - for example, Mariacarla Boscono, Carine Roitfeld, Marina Abramovic. I have different women whom I adore and value.

Even though I had a fantastic family, I always felt lonely - not lonely in the melancholic way but knowing that, to really survive, I have to do everything for myself. I had to work and study, and I was out in the street really surviving, bringing food back home.

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

This is why I decided to work with Nike, too, because it is even more mass-market than Givenchy and could make entry-price shoes and make people dream to be part of the journey.

For me, fashion is a job. I love it. It's my passion. But the most important thing for me in general is 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.