I am what I am. Before I was not so proud to make fashion. My family thought fashion wasn't very interesting. So I hid that.

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.

The fashion industry can in a certain way be very hard and closed.

I was rather free, and I always did what I wanted to do, sometimes without listening to the people who warned me not to do this or that.

For the collection, I am like a painter or a writer. I may or may not be a character in my own story.

As a slave [to fashion], I can be very dramatic and very demanding of myself and of the people I work with.

I love to leave, to be ready-for, to be on the run! That's my boyish side, it's the pant's me! Pants which allow for the attitudes, gestures and movements of a man but that are still female in taste and free enough so that I can slip my hands inside!