After all these years of creating my collections, I still doubt my decision even until the last minute before the fashion show, I keep questioning myself and wondering if I did the right thing.

I married a man who was in fashion. I began to work when my daughter Nathalie was about eight or 10 years old. Then one day I began to make a sweater, and eventually the sweater was on the front page of Elle magazine. And the day after I was the queen of knit in America.

Even if I'm in Japan and I don't speak Japanese and the woman facing me doesn't speak French but she's dressed in Rykiel, and she recognizes me, then we have a common language right away.

It's important to know yourself well, in order to create your own style of fashion to suit your own body shape.

As a young girl I was a real tomboy, only listening to myself. I carried on with this attitude even as a woman and when I first launched the Sonia Rykiel line, and said to women to remove their bras or when I designed sweaters with stitches inside out, everybody said to me that it was crazy and risky, but I ignored what they said and I did what I felt was right at the time.

With the exception of lingerie and theater I'm interested in everything to do with clothes and perfumes: everything which is an extension of woman.

I don't like women who are multiform, who wear many different shapes. Women who retain a unique shape are usually unique people.