When I was in high school in England, I wasn't sure that you could have a career in fashion. In those days, there were very few fashion magazines. I didn't realize there was a school where you could go and learn how to make clothes and design. I thought you just had to be discovered somewhere, like a film.
I almost went to Central Saint Martins for fashion design. I deferred for a year when I graduated high school so that I could go model and make some money and immerse myself in the fashion industry for a year.
Before I went to boarding school, I had never read a fashion magazine. I grew up on a council estate in London, and fashion magazines were a luxury item that weren't even on my mind. The closest I got to a fashion magazine was my cousin's 'Top of the Pops' magazines, where we would learn the lyrics to every song and put posters on our walls.
My fascination with women's clothes began very early. My mother was a very fashionable woman. She also made her own clothes. She had these fashion magazines, and I would draw the women in them. My middle school art teacher suggested that I have a fashion drawing show.
I didn't go to school for fashion, I didn't have anybody to teach me anything about fashion - that's all I knew how to do, graphic design.
When I got into high school, that's when I stated dabbling in fashion design. I got involved in the theater department's costume design and started to think that maybe I'd major in fashion design.
Shortridge High School was an elitist high school. In a way it was a scandal because you could go there no matter where you lived, if you could get there. It was for over-achievers. It was for people who were going to college. So we were very special and we were hated for being ritzy.
You do not need to go to journalism school if you want to work in the fashion industry. I think high schools condition you to think this way: If you want to be a fashion editor, go to fashion school. If you want to be a writer, you should study journalism. I think that the best school in life is experience.
I think fashion is a lot of fun. I love clothes. More than fashion or brand labels, I love design. I love the thought that people put into clothes. I love when clothes make cultural statements and I think personal style is really cool. I also freely recognize that fashion should be a hobby.
I had done a fair bit of traveling during the holidays in my school days with my guitar and discovered that I could live on it. Admittedly, I traveled with a sleeping bag but I could always find somewhere to lay my head.
I always think back to my high school days and realize all the people who were so popular then are nowhere now and all the people who were steadfast and steady-going are somewhere. So high school doesn't necessarily translate to later in life.
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 just thought making machines intelligent was the coolest thing you could do. I had a summer internship in AI in high school, writing neural networks at National University of Singapore - early versions of deep learning algorithms. I thought it was amazing you could write software that would learn by itself and make predictions.
Today I discovered two kinds of people who go to high school: those who wear new clothes to show off on the first day, and those who wear their oldest clothes to show they think school is unimportant.
For high school, everything is about what you wear, how you come to school, and in high school, a lot of people judge you. So fashion is something that can save you - at least, it saved me.
When I was in high school, I had already kind of been working in the industry and had done a couple of acting jobs. There were definitely some girls that were either jealous or thought I was a snob. I was just trying to be a teenage girl and go to high school and have fun like everybody else!
There was a school in Chicago called the School of Design. This was started by [Laszló] Moholy-Nagy, and it was a wonderful school, but we [with Alix MacKenzie] didn't go to that school. We did have friends who went to that school and we would visit there often, and I'm sure it pushed me in my painting direction very strongly just by association.