Never forget that what becomes timeless was once truly new.
What I find most interesting in fashion is that it has to reflect our time. You have to witness your own moment.
With my designs and my ideas, I want to please myself first. I'm always very stressed about making a new proposition every season. But in a way, it's a kind of addiction. In another way, it's a crazy pressure. I try to stay quiet about the whole situation, because fashion itself can be crazy, and everyone wants a part of you.
I think when a time comes, a change comes, and you have to recognize the change but also believe in yourself.
Fashion is a playground up until a certain age. But then you have to find your own signature and your own style.
I love what I do and I adore this whole world. I'm able to meet fantastic people. I meet fantastic writers, I meet architects, I meet incredible talent. Fashion is really a world, besides the creation, that I think is super interesting, super inspiring.
I think creating the clothes is about creating historical images - and that's about more than fashion. It is about the fashion, the photography, what you are doing in the moment. It's what we call in French rechercher, or the search for that thing. So even though fashion is not scientific, I think being a designer is somewhat like being a scientist.
We live with a future where every three or four months, we have to question everything. You think you could be the best, or that you're nothing and you don't know what you're doing. It is exhausting.
Designers are more like artistic directors now. Before, there wasn't this idea of supervising the artistic direction of the entire house. The old way was to think you could be this couturier or designer or stylist.
In French we have this word déclic. It's when you have, suddenly, a light shining and you say, "This is what I want to do."
More than anything, I'm designing for a woman of today. I want to be a witness of my time.
I'm always curious. Every day. As we get on in life, we must be grateful.
You never do things thinking you will make a big statement. It just happens sometimes and you are lucky.
I love this idea of being able to touch people with something quite familiar, something quite emotional, and at the same time, have the feeling that this is a new way of doing it, a fresh way of showing things. I like radical people. At the same time, I'm fascinated by popularity, people who were able to have huge success and also keep their consistency.
I'd rather work with someone who likes what I do than create something for the red carpet that won't make me happy.
I put pressure on myself to propose something new - I think it's the minimum that you can do as a fashion designer.
It's quite strange in fashion, and it's probably the same with movies and acting - the big choice is between being radical, making a choice that will be more specific that will reach less people but will be very strong and very directional, and making a choice that will be more popular and catch the interest of a large group of people. Sometimes people are trying to push you in one direction or another.
You need something that puts a little distance between what you really are and what you want to show; it's a shield, a protection.
Your priority has to be the creativity - and build a brand. That's what everybody did - Balenciaga, Dior, Saint Laurent. That's the smart thing to do.
I don't feel French at all. That was never really a concern, and it's limiting to think that way. I think Paris is more of a playground for international designers, so I don't really feel French. And I don't really want to feel French.
I'm the kind of person who, even after a shoot that I've loved, is always moving on. There is no gap.
Naturally looking at something will become so important in your aesthetic. For that, you have to be disciplined, too, in the way that there is a moment to catch and there is a moment to express. The moment to express has to be so pragmatic, because you have to build the clothes; you have to be very, very specific about how you want to describe to other people, for the color of the fabric, the way of sewing things, putting things together.
People usually forget that fashion designers are not artists, but there is an artistic side that is very strong in my point of view. At the same time, you have to be so organized and so serious. There are two aspects that are quite big contradictions, strangely, in what I'm doing.
Fashion, in a way, has become like pop culture today. With all of the communications and the Internet and the designers doing lines with big brands, it's more popular than it's ever been, but everything is all mixed together. It's become like television or music.
I don't know if that's new, but it has become very official over the past 25 or 30 years - and today it's probably at its most extreme point, where sometimes collections look more like a stylist's work than a designer's signature.
