CHRISTIAN LACROIX

For me, I am still very happy to be able to do stage design as it's an opportunity to express the extreme.

I think it's always difficult to reconcile the needs of art and business.

I look for friends who make me laugh.

The world needs some excitement from fashion.

Very skinny women don't look beautiful in clothes.

We all look for lost time.

They say that the best furniture and clothing design from the '50s and '60s is Scandinavian or Milanese.

In Italy, the Milanese are well organized but follow bourgeois taste. They adhere to certain codes of elegance, but not to individualism.

Fashion needs to be worn.

I translated Beatles songs for my English class.

You need ego but mine is not blinding.

There are days when I'm completely depressed and able to do only one drawing.

The exchange by e-mail is more intimate than conversation - you allow yourself to say things you otherwise wouldn't.

If you look back at the history of creativity in clothes - the French Revolution, the First World War and the Second World War - they have all been creative reinventions, the moment new forms of luxury come into play.

The idea of seeing everybody clad the same is not really my cup of tea.

There's always some kind of hidden logic.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been influenced by the idea that my name could be spread across the entire world.

I am still in love with couture because it is just two months from drawing pad to runway so everything on the catwalk is hot from the oven.

Going out in Paris was like going out in the '30s dressed like the Andrews Sisters. It was everything I'd seen in books at my grandparents' house, only it was our generation.

Italy is a divided country without a center.

But the Milanese have made bad choices, bad fashion, and bad jewelry.

If I was a fashion designer just following trends or designing for celebrities, I would not be fulfilled.

French design hardly exists, except as artificial modernism.

People want to be in their own fashion tribes, so they want to wear the same clothes to be connected to everyone else in that tribe. But they want to be different from other tribes.

I am not nostalgic for the past.