But if fashion were easy, wouldn't everybody look great?
Fashion is a dream. It's difficult, and there are many aspects of fashion that are very difficult, but if you love it like I do, because I really have a passion, now, for fashion, it's not easy, but nothing is easy in life.
Love is not easy. All great religions postulate love as one of the greatest accomplishments. If it were that easy, or as easy as most people think, certainly, the great religious leaders would have been rather naive.
I think the problem is that fashion has become too fashionable. For years, fashion wasn't fashionable. Today fashion is so fashionable that it's almost embarrassing to say you're part of fashion. All the parodies of it. All the dreadful magazines. That has destroyed it as well, because everybody thinks fashion is attainable.
If I'm wearing jeans all day at work, it's [hard] to slip into a dress and make yourself feel like you were born in it. That sort of thing can really be the difference between a good look and a great look. You can have a great dress, but when you put it on and you feel like it's embodying who you are that day, that's not just fashion, that's style!
Once you establish a look, and once everybody recognizes that look as your look, you never have to think about fashion again.
It's easy to take the shortcut and use animal skins. But I think animal skins look tired. They're not very innovative. They're old-fashioned. And great fashion should be something new.
The great Chicago teams when Tex Winter and Phil Jackson were there - the triangle was just amazing. I know Michael Jordan was great, but everybody touched the ball, everybody cut, everybody moved. It was just so hard to guard.
I think fashion today is horrible. Just open your eyes and look! What's good about it? There's no originality. Here and there, there is, but in general, en masse, there's very little creativity and very little originality. It's kind of boring. Everybody looks alike. Everybody seems to strive to look alike.
What I learned from being around great icons like Calvin Klein is that the great fashion trendsetters don't change their look every season. They have a look, and they update maybe a piece per season.
Fashion is not easy. You have to change your eye to look for beauty all the time.
If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were not following the trends.
There are so many fashion shows during fashion week, and the fashion show has almost become theater. It's all about the wow factor. And it's easy to make a name when you're shocking people all the time. But when you just make really, really great clothes, it can be difficult to get press and build a brand. What you do when you pare things back and make something timeless, though, is build a foundation to have a longer career and a stronger clientele.
One doesn't want fashion to look ridiculous, silly, or out of step with the times - but you do want designers that make you think, that make you look at fashion differently. That's how fashion changes. If it doesn't change, it's not looking forward. And that's important to me.
I'm a professional world champion. Of course if you're a world champion, you're working harder than everybody else. You're making the commitment, and you're making the sacrifices. If it were easy, everybody would be able to do it. Everybody would be able to be world champion, but everybody can't be. Everybody doesn't have it in them.
My biggest challenge in making 'The Devil Wears Prada' was simply to maintain a tone of sophistication and reality. It's about the fashion world, or it's set in the fashion world, and that's a world that's easy to mock. It's easy to satirise people trying to lose weight and choosing between fancy clothes.