I would hate for someone to look at my shoe and say, 'Oh my God! That looks so comfortable!'
I feel I am a role model to many, not just for my designs, but also for the fact that I started my own company with the help of my two friends. I became a success story, and people relate to that.
In a creative business, if you're happy, it will come out in your work. I don't see how you can be happy if you don't like the people you're working with and if they aren't a joy to have fun with.
My mother was a huge influence on me - she was a free spirit and helped me appreciate, from a very early age, that everyone is different.
If you are not bored by life, and your primary motto is enthusiasm and if you like your friends, family around you, it all translates into your designs. That's what keeps the creativity alive.
Designing my shoes, I'm thinking timeless. Not trendy.
You know, I'm behind my company. My company has been a big part of my life. And it's not that I been buying a company or that my father bought a company and tried to do something out of it. You know, it's not the same thing. It's my name, it's my company, it's my signature.
My father, who was a cabinetmaker, told me, 'Wood has a grain and if you go into the grain, you have beauty. If you go against it, you have splinters - it breaks.' And I took that as my view of life. You have to follow the grain - to be sensitive to the direction of life.
When you are too specific on a target, it can drain you. Ask me where I will be when I am 60, and I will have no answer to give.
I was always shouted at by my teacher because I would draw straight on the table in the school.
The most outrageous shoe that I had to do was a shoe where the person gave me stones - precious stones - and say that I could do anything with precious stones.
In designing shoes for myself; I'm not thinking of a specific person or catwalk. I'm just not thinking of clothes at all. I'm always thinking of a naked woman, actually.
I really wish I had invented the flip-flop. I love flip-flops. It's the one style of shoe I would be so proud of inventing: the Havaiana.
A house is very much like a portrait. I cannot disconnect houses from people. The thought of arrangement, the curves and straight lines. It gives an indication of the character at the heart of it.
I like Adele, Mika, Natacha Atlas and a beautiful old record, 'An Evening with Belafonte/Mouskouri,' starring Harry Belafonte and Nana Mouskouri. What they have in common is they all have incredible voices. I am very much into voices. I would say I'm a fan of voices, not of sound. I'm a fan of singers, not of bands.
There's nothing I liked visually of the period I was a child. There was no dream in it, and nothing sparkled.
I have this disease that if I feel good somewhere, I... buy a house.
People are proud of their tattoos. It's like a modern coat of arms.
A lot of my friends have tattoos; I realized that it's not only just a part of pop culture, but a bit of a map on someone's body, which says something about people. A part of their life, like an armor or a crest.
I love deep cleavage on the foot. It reminds me of Berlin in 1930s, 'Cabaret.'
I’ve always been very detail orientated, but I have gone from embellishment to nudity - from designing for a woman that likes to be dressed to designing for a woman that likes to be undressed.
I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.
I wouldn't take it as a compliment if someone looked at one of my shoes and said, 'Oh, that looks like a comfortable shoe.' There is a heel that is too high to walk in, certainly. But who cares? You don't have to walk in high heels.
When I have meetings scheduled so tight that I can't go to the loo, that's where I draw the line!
Madonna is a feminist and has been doing more for the cause than all the grumpy feminists, who are giving nothing back by being grumpy.
