I am a perfectionist. This job is a total ego thing in a way. To be a designer and say, ‘This is the way they should dress; this is the way their homes should look; this is the way the world should be.’ But then, that’s the goal: world domination through style.
I don’t wear a lot of color. In fact, I don’t actually like color on myself. I love color but it’s very challenging, it’s very powerful, it can overpower you. I think if my eyes were closed and someone put a red jacket on me, I would be able to feel that it was red. I don’t feel great in color.
People always ask me how I start a collection, and I tell them that I just look around. What am I tired of? What am I in the mood for? Real fashion change comes from real changes in real life. Everything else is just decoration.
If I were straight and I were trying to seduce a woman, I could do it just by standing up at the table when she came back from the bathroom. It works. Every time I do that, all the straight men are sitting at the table and their wives are kicking them. “Look at that!” “You never do that for me!”
Fashion is everything. Art, music, furniture design, graphic design, hair, makeup, architecture, the way cars look – all those things go together to make a moment in time, and that’s what excites me.
When I was a little kid, all I wanted to do was to escape what I thought was the country and get to a city. Probably film and television had influenced me so much, I really thought the key to happiness was living a very artificial life in a penthouse in New York with martini glasses.
