I don't know if I would want to come back as anything but me. I feel really satisfied. I don't really want to be anyone else. I just feel like I've gotten everything I signed up for as me. I'm happy as me.
I guess I accidentally became a part of history. Honestly, when you're young and you're a designer, you have a goal, but that is not the kind of goal that you even think it's possible to achieve.
In designing for the first lady, I tried to sort of be in her shoes, but I didn't really look at her as an important political figure. I looked at her as a woman who would like to wear a beautiful dress to an important gala.
I love the idea of working with women because I always feel like a man designing womenswear needs women around him to really have a sense of what they're doing.
Anyone who knows me knows that I don't know anything about politics. Every time I go to Washington, I feel like I'm in Legally Blonde.
The idea of transformation is super-important to me. You can see it in the way I approach things. I have never been a clean-faced, freshly scrubbed hair person. I'm the New York designer who doesn't do that. I think about the hair and makeup almost as much as I think about the clothes because it all has to work.
The worst thing is to be a designer and create work that isn't honest. You have to be honest. Otherwise, you'll always be a reaction to what other people do and you'll always be one step behind.
As a designer you have to just do whatever you want to do. The second I came to terms with that, it transformed my work.
What I was interested in wasn't popular and young, but I never really deviated from doing it. I just decided that I was going to go full force into exactly what I wanted. I think there's a certain comfort that comes with age and experience, and when I got that, I think my work got better.
The polishedness and the sophistication were what I was interested in. I mean, give me a polka dot, a floral print, a pleated dress, a big fur coat, that was always my language, and it wasn't very "in" when I was starting out, so I had a difficult time in the beginning.
I think it's really important to make things your own in your voice. I started when I was 23, and in the beginning of my career, there was this expectation of a young designer being edgier, cooler, more downtown. But I was never that person.
I realized the importance of archiving. So I save key pieces from my collections, as well as any red-carpet things that become iconic. I always ask for that stuff back. I'm like, "It's going in my archives."
I think a beautiful dress on the wrong woman could mean nothing. It has to be the right woman and the right clothes. That's why you need that personal touch. I mean, that's why I went into this business to begin with.
This is the hardest thing I've ever done, being in fashion business, because that's what it is at the end of the day, a business, and you have to make sure it works.
I woke up one day and I was like, "I don't have anything to save for myself for the future." That's when I started archiving things. I take four or five things that are really key to each collection, and I restore them or, in some cases, remake parts of them, and archive them.
You're always in the mode of creating the next season. It's so fast, and in two months, the collection you just did is already old, and it's always next, next, next.
I need to feel like I'm part of something. I need to feel part of the world when I go to sleep.
I always have the TV on. When there's no TV, I play music. I like having noise. I think that's why New York is so suitable for me, because it's never really fully quiet.
My parents are very comfortable with the way that I am, and I think they've always been. Without that, I don't think that I would have ever have been able to grow into the person that I am today. I never felt like I was hiding anything from them.
When I was 12 or 13 I already knew that I was gay. And then my interests were not conventional. So I was very different, in every sense of the word. And in an all-boys school, that's tough.
I think what I create is serious fashion, but I don't want to keep my focus on that. You have to look at a lot of different things. I mean, people are always surprised when they find out that my favorite show is RuPaul's Drag Race.
I don't collect things per se, but I do pick up things as I go. Like, in my studio I have an old sewing machine from Germany that my dad gave me, and then something else that I got from a friend in India, and a piece of flooring from one of my shows.
My inspirations come from everywhere. It's important to look at everything and anything.
My mom used to take me to antique shows, which I hated because everything was so dusty and old and there were all these weird ladies selling their antiques. We call them "eclectic" now. But it was really amazing that I was exposed to that when I was younger. Now that I have my own taste, I understand it more.
I would love to take an old space and restore it to exactly the way I want it. Like an old factory, just something with great bones and lots of character. I'd take an old house and flip it into something very modern inside, or the other way around.
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