I was bullied every day at school because I carried a briefcase. I could have left it at home. But I thought it looked great! I didn't understand why anyone else didn't think so.

When I was a kid, I thought I was going to be an actor. I actually studied acting when I was at NYU, and I made a lot of television commercials - that's actually how I put myself through NYU and through college.

Just because one is spiritual doesn't mean that one doesn't like crocodile, cashmere. We live in a material world. We still experience these things. It doesn't mean to completely disregard them.

On the one hand, I want to go off and live in the desert with my dog and sculpt things out of adobe.

I don't do shows. I don't have reviews. I'm not putting the clothes on every celebrity so that by the time they reach the store the customers are sick of seeing them.

I interview these people all the time who come to my office and say, "I want to be a fashion designer." I tell them where they should start, and they say, "I don't want to do that. I don't want to get anyone coffee." Don't they know it is great to get people coffee?

I was lucky enough to have had great success early on in life; to have had all the things the material world can offer. And yet, I realized that what I had actually neglected was the more spiritual side of myself, which has always been there. But it's easy for us in our culture to become consumed in a sense by materialism. Now materialism is fine. We live in a material world. I'm not saying that beautiful things don't enhance our lives. But, in our culture, we're never happy.