The most successful achievers in sports are people that are really driven and have that spirit of hunger.
I'm not an artist: I'm a businesswoman. Well, maybe an artist/businesswoman.
The corporateness of the fashion industry tends to take away or distort the freedom of creation.
The Dover Street Markets bring brands of all disciplines together to sell their products in an open atmosphere that, most importantly, incites creativity. They are, along with the 'Comme des Garcons' stores, usually located in areas off the beaten track.
My design process never starts or finishes. I am always hoping to find something through the mere act of living my daily life. I do not work from a desk and do not have an exact starting point for any collection.
I want to create a market where people from all walks of life can encounter each other in an atmosphere of beautiful chaos, the coming together of kindred souls.
I built my work from within instead of satisfying a demand for sexualised and ostentatious clothing.
All kinds of ways of expression are spreading out all over the place, information is overflowing, and it's harder and harder to be excited about anything.
I've always said that, growing up in postwar Japan, I never felt any connection to my work through those experiences. The work I do really comes from inside myself. For me, being born in Japan was an accident.
Growing up in postwar Japan has made me the person I am, but it is not why I do the work I do. It is a very personal thing - everything comes from inside.
I am always thinking that some interesting possibility, some accidental synergy, could occur in a collaboration, and people seem to like it.
If you have total freedom to design, you won't get anything interesting. So I give myself restraints in order to kind of push myself through, to create something new. It's the torture that I give myself, the pain and the struggle that I go through.
Many parts of the media have created the situation where uninteresting fashion can thrive.
As I live my normal life, I hope to find something that click starts a thought, and then something totally unrelated would arise, and then maybe a third unconnected element would come from nowhere.
