Journalist

I have a love for colorful things. I'm a fashion maximalist. I come from the school of people who look at the decoration in Marie Antoinette's bedroom, and think 'Why so reserved?'

I do believe fashion should work as hard as a woman does.

I am not really sure that Diana Vreeland did Yves Saint Laurent a favor, as opposed to the world, by putting that exhibition at the Met in 1983. Because I'm sure that Saint Laurent started looking back at his own work. You see that with artists, don't you? Once they get their first retrospective, it's really hard for them to push ahead.

Clothes, as much as music, have an eerie echo of time and place.

At the 'Times,' all journalists on every subject followed the same rules and were supposed to meet the same standards, so I never really thought about fashion writing as being in a bubble.

Clothes are like friends.

The clothes that fire up my emotions are colorful and 'different' pieces. My eye still picks out gilded-cloque glamour from among Burberry's streamlined trench coats or a hand-printed coat from Dries Van Noten.

Change is good; it's what fashion is all about.

I knew him, but never felt that I got really close to Saint Laurent. But who really did? Betty Catroux, maybe.

I think there's a sort of agony with all intelligent and very creative designers that it's only fashion, that in the end it's only the decorative arts. I had a feeling towards the end that Saint Laurent and Berge were very keen to attain that immortality that a lot of designers long for. You know, those endless exhibitions.

I don't really believe in elegance. Ever since I first came to France many years ago to do the Chambre Syndicale course, I always felt I was somehow lacking, first of all being British - obviously a disaster! But I was also puzzled with this idea that you have to tie your Hermes scarf just right, or you can only wear black.

As a journalist, I cannot help imagining with excitement a new era with a face-off between Hedi Slimane at YSL and Raf Simons at Dior - a magnificent battle of style and wills to echo the Armani/Versace, Gucci/Prada or even Chanel/Schiaparelli face-offs of earlier years. But I remind myself that this is not a game of chess.

There is no doubt that online shopping has fed the craze for speed, because when you can't touch the fabric or try on the outfit, the only emotion you experience is the excitement of the purchase and the thrill of beating everyone else to it.

Only the fat-cat corporations can really afford to put on two mega-ready-to-wear shows a year, or four if you add two haute couture shows, or six if you count men's wear. Resort and prefall push the number up to eight. A couple of promotional shows in Asia, Brazil, Dubai or Moscow can bring the count to 10.

When I look at my clothes, I think of them as an expression of the joy and fun of fashion - with a bit of English eccentricity thrown in.

With a global society hungry for luxury, distribution and supply chains are now as important for executives as a hands-on feel for products.

Smartphones are so fabulous in so many ways that it seems daft to be nostalgic about the days when an image did not go round the world in a nanosecond.

In the mid-1990s, when I stopped having to run from the shows to the film developing lab and first saw digital images, I blessed technology and was convinced that my working life was changing for the better.

I was trained as journalist never to use the word 'I,' never to put my own opinion there. In fact, if you had a dollar or a euro for every time I use the word 'I,' you would be a poor person. But this is not true in general. I like the idea of being able to stand away and make a judgement.

If fashion is for everyone, is it fashion? The answer goes far beyond the collections and relates to the speed of fast fashion. There is no longer a time gap between when a small segment of fashion-conscious people pick up a trend and when it is all over the sidewalks.