Alexander McQueen

There is no better designer than nature.

I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists.

Clothes and jewellery should be startling, individual. When you see a woman in my clothes, you want to know more about them. To me, that is what distinguishes good designers from bad designers.

I can design a collection in a day and I always do, cause I've always got a load of Italians on my back, moaning that it's late.

Now I design what I want to wear, and it works that way.

I come from a different era and I design clothes for our era. I think of people I want to dress when I design.

I don't want to be too proud, but I have a good personal style.

I want people to be afraid of the women I dress.

I always wanted to be a designer. I read books on fashion from the age of 12.

Rap music's been around for too long now to be inspirational. The words are, but the music isn't.

There is something sinister, something quite biographical about what I do - but that part is for me. It's my personal business. I think there is a lot of romance, melancholy. There's a sadness to it, but there's romance in sadness. I suppose I am a very melancholy person.

I want to be the purveyor of a certain silhouette or a way of cutting, so that when I am dead and gone people will know that the twenty-first century was started by Alexander McQueen.

Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment.