It's the ultimate for me not to see how it's made. I find it vulgar when you can distinguish how something is made. I used to be a student at the Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture in Paris, and once I got to go to a Saint Laurent couture show. Everyone was always talking about how fabulous the tailoring was, but I was transfixed by this one particular dress. It was just a piece of fabric, but as the model was walking, you didn't know how she got into it, how it closed, where the seams were, and that, for me, was perfection. It stayed with me as a lifelong vision.

The Maier woman is not a woman who doesn't have fun. My woman is not a woman who doesn't have a life. I like clothes to suggest something. I'm gay, but so what? I still have that sensibility that I like to look at a beautiful woman, and I'm as intrigued as any straight man. I probably look even harder because I like what you don't see.

I think every collection is always a move forward. It's the same work - the process is always the same. The interesting thing is to try to achieve a certain nothingness.

I'm more European than anything. I've lived in America for 10 years, and I live in Florida because I like to be outdoors. I live a week in New York, and I live a week in Italy. When I'm here in Italy, I come to work at eight in the morning and usually I leave work at 10 o'clock at night. I don't even breathe the air. So that's why I like to live outside.

Where I grew up, we spent a lot of time outside. I moved to Paris when I was 19, and from then on, it was exactly the opposite. On the weekend, you go to the galleries, the museums, the movies. And I thought, "I'm not going to be like all of these friends I've had who are now at this certain stage in their lives, and they are all unhappy with themselves because they never get out in the fresh air or the sun, and they get so disconnected from their bodies that they have to just layer and layer and layer like onions. I am not getting old like that."

I've been in clothes-making for 32 years. Think how many times I've made a blazer in my life, how many shirts I've made. What's interesting is to strive for a certain perfection, and what's perfect is nothing.

In Italy there is a supreme know-how and a desire to achieve that doesn't really exist anywhere else. You can't make clothes like that in America, because it's just not in the tradition.