Alessandro Michele

My life - it's a piece of work. And my work is a piece of life.

I've been an avid collector since I was a child.

I always explain through images and characters what fashion means, and describing scent is almost the same. It can be very powerful. It can really change the perspective a person has of you.

Beauty has no boundaries, no rules, no colors. Beauty is like a religion. You can include everything inside it.

I have something inside of me that every day tells me that nature and beauty is the soul, the meaning, of our life. And I also love Hollywood and cinema.

Gender and sex are about rules which we have invented, but we are animals; we belong to nature.

I had two different kind of parents. My mother was obsessive with movie stars and cinema and Hollywood because she worked in movies. And my father was obsessed with beauty everywhere - in art, in nature, animals.

There is something special about the beauty in the unclear, the ambiguity, the in-between that you can't totally recognise.

Fashion should be genderless; how people perceive the idea of beauty can vary from one to another.

There is something in Shanghai that is very exciting and alive - the idea of a city with two different souls, one from today and another from a long time ago, is amazing.

My father was a shaman. He told me that time doesn't exist. He didn't use a clock. He didn't know when my birthday was.

I spend a lot of time in Paris, in Milan, and in New York, and Rome is a little bit different. There is something in Rome, incredible, like in a Fellini movie. Everybody's screaming and laughing very loud. It's something that can give me more energy in terms of freedom.