I love to dress up and create a narrative with my look.
In every woman's wardrobe, there are certain accessories that cannot be separated from their back stories.
Fashion has always captivated me because, like I said, it has the potential to create narratives about what's beautiful, aspirational, chic, masculine, feminine, glamorous, etc. Generally, this power is dispatched in useless ways.
My clothes have a story. They have an identity. They have a character and a purpose. That's why they become classics. Because they keep on telling a story. They are still telling it.
Every designer needs a story. Mine is all about glamour.
I do fashion to tell a narrative.
In 1990 I did a story with Helena Christensen about a woman who lives in a trailer in the middle of the desert and finds a little crushed UFO with a martian who has survived the crash. She takes him home, and they fall in love. Later he has to meet with his fellow martians who have arrived to rescue him. It's a sad ending. This was my first truly narrative story and apparently the first narrative story in fashion photography.
Both costume and fashion are about telling a story, except that in a ballet the story has already been written by the composer or the librettist.
My relationship with fashion has always been that each of us stars in our own movies and costumes ourselves to play the part we want. You take blouses and jeans and dresses, and you put them together, and they tell your story.
I feel glamour has a legit place on the ramp and in the fashion world. In films, glamour has to service the story.
Fashion is this obsessive narrative that people don't understand but they can't stop looking at.
When Ralph Lauren creates a collection of clothes, he's not really worried about a single tie or a single shirt or a single belt... he's creating a movie, and the characters that he casts in his advertisements or the people that work in the stores are the actors in his life.
For me, reworking the past over and over again is a way not to trivialise the garments and not to obsess over hem lengths. What I am interested in, as a matter of fact, is telling a story and, if someone sees fragments of other stories in it, be my guest. I don't have to justify myself. What is urgent for me is what I want to say.
I usually talk about clothes in terms of a story rather than a colour.
The media is looking every season for a designer to tell a story. I have a long story I have to tell, continuing fluently year after year.
Where would fashion be without literature?
What I love in fashion is to tell a story through a creation.
