I've been writing an ongoing letter to my children since they were born, full of recollections of their childhoods. I've filled two journals. It's a great thing to do as a mother - you forget a lot as you go along, but reading over what you've writte...
I am not allowed to be afraid. My mother made me like that. As a child, if I was afraid of the dark, she would lock me in the closet. Things like this. And she would talk about the time she spent in the concentration camp, but not about being afraid,...
I honestly think that with our generation - Alex Wang, Prabal Gurung, Jason Wu, Christian Cota, Robert Geller - there's a different expectation of what our behavior should be. People expect designers to be good businesspeople and PR people, and I don...
Yes, e-commerce is a strange situation for an old guy like me. You can buy a TV online, OK, but to buy a dress or shoes? Ugh. The customer has to go back to the store and breathe and smell and have a good time. Because shopping is a good time - like ...
Clarity is the most important thing. I can compare clarity to pruning in gardening. You know, you need to be clear. If you are not clear, nothing is going to happen. You have to be clear. Then you have to be confident about your vision. And after tha...
At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school,...
I didn't want to be thirtysomething and not know what I was going to do. I was quite afraid of that, there were quite a lot of aimless kids around, in that 'other' side of my life, who didn't really know what to do because they always had a bank bala...
I love the way people dress at the races. I love people dressed to the nines during the day. That formal kind of daywear doesn't really exist anymore except at the races. Also I love the tuffs and the working classes being so hand in glove and relyin...
There's a side to me that likes to make clothes for everyday. But I also think of fashion as an escape. It's like a dream. Even in an economy that isn't strong and where it's important to sell clothes, you have to make things that let people dream a ...
The apparent pointlessness of fashion may be just what makes it so strong as a zeitgeist sensor. Even I, a designer, do not know why a certain proportion feels dated or why another one feels exciting at a given moment. I leave that to the cultural hi...
Style is timeless. It transcends generations - it's enduring. If you're thinking about fashion, it's of the moment. And that doesn't mean that it's not important at times to embrace trends and that type of thing, but style is less about trends than i...
In the early '70s, coming out of the '60s, it was very hippy or it was very uniform, like The Beatles all wearing the same suit. Into the '70s, it became much more about a personal style. You had the glam period, which was a lot of fun, and then you ...
I am an Asian designer. I was born in Taiwan. That is who I am. But I am a designer, like any designer of any race. Growing up in the '80s in Taiwan, the arts were not considered a career.
When I was a little girl, if I didn't eat my soup, my mother would say, 'You have to think of all the Chinese children who have nothing to eat.' But now, for my children, Chinese people make everything, and for my grandchildren, they buy everything.
I think by my father owning a store, I was definitely aware of the commercial aspect of selling clothes. His shop was a place I enjoyed spending time in as a boy, so I learned things almost by osmosis at times, by literally just being around all the ...
I haven't made many wedding dresses. It's a dress very, very important for the girl; it's important to know the person, I believe, but at the same time it should be a shock to the person - the person should be shocked to be suddenly revealed. That's ...
We package everything as a product so we can derive income from it. Then we can occupy ourselves with higher-order psychological lifestyle things. This is a very new issue. Money still matters, but other factors have joined the status game - like how...
I dress some of the most successful women in the world, and meeting these women rubs off on you. A few years ago, the woman was someone I imagined in my head. Now they're real. It's important my work evolve along with me and that I show more facets o...
Imagine if all those kings and dukes hadn't commissioned those crazy cathedrals, paintings and music... we'd still be living in sticks and mud. Because none of those things made any economic sense. Human beings' capacity to 'waste time' is a miracle ...
Until I was eighteen, I did not know that you could study fashion design or art. I really didn't know. I already had my nose in the art world; I was already looking at things, but I didn't really get it that you could study that because my school was...
I don't have so many things in the fashion world that interest me. It's probably because I am so deeply into it. Often when you go very deep into something, you also discover what it's about, and you understand it better. With the art world, I still ...
