A shoe is not only a design, but it's a part of your body language, the way you walk. The way you're going to move is quite dictated by your shoes.
People say I am the king of painful shoes. I don't want to create painful shoes, but it is not my job to create something comfortable. I try to make high heels as comfortable as they can be, but my priority is design, beauty and sexiness. I'm not against them, but comfort is not my focus.
Even today, I am still very child-like while designing. It's a bit like Christmas - each of your designs you create is like unravelling your presents.
I mean, the shoe - there is a music to it, there is attitude, there is sound, it's a movement. Clothes - it's a different story. There are a million things I'd rather do before designing clothes: directing, landscaping.
I feel I am a role model to many, not just for my designs, but also for the fact that I started my own company with the help of my two friends. I became a success story, and people relate to that.
I never wanted to design clothes. I never wanted to work for the fashion industry. Shoes sort of belong to the fashion industry, which is why I'm part of the fashion industry. But that's never been my thought. My thought since I was a child was really to design those shoes for girls on stage.
I have no problem with the idea of comfort, but it is not an important thing aesthetically. If you look at a shoe and immediately say it looks very comfortable, in terms of design, it is not going to excite me. Of course, I am not putting nails in my shoes to ensure everybody is in pain, but a heel is not a pair of slippers and never will be.
I’ve always been very detail orientated, but I have gone from embellishment to nudity - from designing for a woman that likes to be dressed to designing for a woman that likes to be undressed.
If you are not bored by life, and your primary motto is enthusiasm and if you like your friends, family around you, it all translates into your designs. That's what keeps the creativity alive.
I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.
[While designing] I'm mixing two lines of thought really: me as a designer for women and then me as a man. At the start of the design process it's the designer for women that comes to the forefront - sketching and revising the silhouette. Then the man comes into the picture - and I look at the shoe from a very masculine point of view. Then there is a conflict between the two sides of me. Sometimes the man wins, and sometimes the designer wins.
Designing my shoes, I'm thinking timeless. Not trendy.
I never was interested in being part of the fashion world - I just wanted to design shoes. I didn't even know Vogue existed when I was growing up. Vogue, what is that?
Designing is always on the mind of a designer, and as I was saying it's a sort of digestive process, so I usually keep it to myself unless I'm collaborating with someone because explaining all the things that are going on in your head can be quite exhausting, especially in the early stages of a project.
There are a million things I'd rather do before designing clothes: directing, landscaping.
I'd already decided I wanted to design shoes after I saw a sign in the Museum of African and Oceanic Art forbidding high heels. Well, who could resist?
In designing shoes for myself; I'm not thinking of a specific person or catwalk. I'm just not thinking of clothes at all. I'm always thinking of a naked woman, actually.
Being on a trapeze is like dreaming. I feel totally outside of myself when I'm flying. You know, designing shoes, my imagination is flying in my drawings.
My job is designing shoes. It's work that happens behind the scenes, as they say, and that suits me just fine because in general I am a shy person. But sometimes I have these extroverted outbursts.
At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater!
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