My design philosophy is to make women feel like peacocks.

I guess I will always be known as a designer who references Ibiza, even though I've only been to the island a couple of times in my early twenties.

I'm not one to pat myself on my back, but I have had a career for 20 years, and if people are interested in how I did it or if I can give any advice, then that's lovely.

It's always better when travelling to be in a place where your friends know the area well.

Grade school ruined reading for me by demanding book reports for such snore-a-thons as Benjamin Franklin's biography written for children.

I've never studied the classics, but I'd like to. My teacher offered to show me how the Greeks were able to sculpt someone perfectly. From there, you can go off and experiment - sort of like jazz. Once you learn to play anything, you can break the form and go and do something even bigger.

Knowing what I do now, I don't know if I'd ever have the balls to go to film school, with no connections and no knowledge of the business side at all.

After graduate school, I joined Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island as an assistant professor, but I continued to program in addition to teaching and working on research. I built a program that crawled job boards to determine which skills employers value, which helped Johnson & Wales explore ways to improve its curriculum.