“I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.”

Even the most understated ceremony involves a certain respect for ritual and pageantry. No one plays more of a significant role than the bride’s attendants.

It’s hard to balance everything. It’s always challenging.

I hate phones. All businesses are personal businesses, and I always try my best to get back to people, but sometimes the barrage of calls is so enormous that if I just answered calls I would do nothing else.

I do think I know more about clothes than any 500 designers, because there’s nothing like wearing them. You buy them, you study them, and you start to understand how they’re crafted.

I want people to see the dress, but focus on the woman.

I am not the sort of woman who would wear high heels with a bathing suit. Let’s get that straight right now.

I started at the very highest level so the upper end is something I know very well. I know it instinctively. But all the years I was designing, it frustrated me that I could reach so few women.

I like the gritty parts of fashion, the design, the studio, the pictures.

People get very trapped where they are. When they hear ‘fashion’ they get intimidated, particularly at the upper end because it’s so elitist.

There was no relationship between a wedding dress and fashion. There was no good taste, either. I realized that I could make an impression in terms of changing and readdressing the whole industry of bridal.

Is she going to, or has she done it? Has it happened? What is the story here?

I was trying to manage school and training for the Olympics and ended up not doing well at either. That was a big lesson in my life. My mother expected both.

It’s a remarkable exercise to sit and look at your own work over the years.

As the mother of two daughters, I have great respect for women. And I don’t ever want to lose that.

Let’s be realistic, how many people are buying a $2,000 skirt? I love to design things that people can actually buy. I’m staggered by what a boot costs today.

A bride should look at everything she possibly can…just so she can experiment and see what makes her really feel beautiful or glamorous or classical or whatever she desires to be on that particular day.

Culture is a matrix of infinite possibilities and choices. From within the same culture matrix we can extract arguments and strategies for the degradation and ennoblement of our species, for its enslavement or liberation, for the suppression of its productive potential or its enhancement.

How much savage coarseness is concealed in refined, cultivated manners.

The same questions are there in Native American languages, they’re there in native Canadian languages, they’re there is some marginalized European languages, like say, Irish.

I am told that today rather more than 60 per cent of the men who go to university go on a Government grant. This is a new class that has entered upon the scene. It is the white-collar proletariat. They do not go to university to acquire culture but to get a job, and when they have got one, scamp it.

The kingdom of music is not the kingdom of this world; it will accept those whom breeding and intellect and culture have alike rejected.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, this is me and the damned world can go to hell.

So what I thought was just an African problem or issue is actually a global phenomenon about relationships of power between languages and cultures.

Every human being must have a point at which he stands against the culture, where he says, “This is me and the world be damned!” Leaders have always been the ones to stand against the society – Socrates, Christ, Freud, all the way down the line.