Peter Marino, the architect and interior designer, takes no prisoners. That’s apparent in everything from the way he dresses—the infamous head-to-toe leather getups, complete with the peaked cap that conceals a jet-black mohawk—to the way he talks—a stream of no-holds-barred opinion, expressed in an accent that hovers closer to England than his native New York. In an age of focus-group-driven conformity, you sense that his fearlessness is the key draw for a client list that reads like an A-to-Z of luxury brands. (“X is for the ones I’ve turned down,” he jokes.) I spoke to him earlier this fall as he was preparing several new boutiques around the world for long-standing clients like Chanel, Zegna, and Louis Vuitton; a concept store in South Korea called Boon the Shop; numerous residential projects; and an exhibition at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami, opening December 4, that showcases both his career and his extraordinary art collection. Sitting in his office high above Manhattan, Marino started sketching on a sheaf of paper, and before I knew it, the conversation had turned from introductory small talk to a vivid dissection of the current retail scene.

What sort of trends are you seeing across the retail landscape?

If I may say something, my career has seen what I call the rise of luxury boutiques. I mean, luxury boutiques used to be right here [sketches on paper] with Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus department stores 20 years ago, and a boutique was 1,000 square feet. Now I do Chanels that are 10,000 square feet and [Louis] Vuittons that are 30. Nobody thinks a department store is a luxury shopping experience anymore. Nobody. That’s in the middle, and then you go down and at the bottom you’ll have H&M in the front and young things. So the trend really was luxury boutiques, and I think due to the finance world they became Wall Street-backed firms. Hermès went public. Prada went public. LVMH is public. They got huge financing, hence they were enabled to go this way [draws an up arrow], and the department stores unfortunately got caught in that junk-bond mess of the ’90s, trading hands 50 times, and they’re all broke and they all have negative cash flow, so they’re going this way [draws a down arrow]. The lower end is fine. H&M is fine. And the luxury brands are fine. And to me … the department experience in every way, shape, and form is a downer.

Do you think that trend will continue?

Oh, that I don’t know. [But] I don’t see any of the very profitable companies buying department stores. I don’t see LVMH saying like, “Oh, yeah, we really want Saks.” It’s been for sale five times … They want to do what they’re good at, and the luxury brands have been really good at pulling themselves away and distancing themselves from this, what I call really unpleasant shopping experience. I mean … Have you been to Bloomingdale’s lately? People push you. I mean, they just push you. I guess if you like subways …

It used to be very much part of my weekend: the social experience of going to a store like Barneys, seeing what was new, maybe eating at the restaurant. It was part of the recreation. And then maybe you bought something, maybe you didn’t, depending, but I feel that’s changed now. And part of that, I think, is that everything’s online, so I don’t need to go to the store just to see what’s new.

You don’t need to go to browse. The browsing aspect of retail buying is over, is what you’re saying? That’s probably true. I’ll give you some funny statistics because I always get these from the brands. At the top luxury boutiques, for every four customers who go in, only one makes an actual purchase. That surprised me. I said, “Really? What do the other three do? Are they just tourists?” They go, “Well, no. They may say, ‘I’ll come back, hold the merchandise.’ They may say, ‘Give me the number,’ and then go home and buy it in Dallas because they may be a tourist and they don’t want to make a rushed decision.” It means that only 25 percent of people who go into a luxury boutique make an actual purchase now. I don’t know the statistics in these other ones, I’m just giving you what I know is a basket of five luxury brands, which I find an interesting statistic, because I always get nervous that if that number goes down, maybe they’ll stop hiring me. [laughs] Like, 1 out of 10? Who needs stores? But the attitude of the luxury brands, which I think is so clever, is for all four out of the four people who go into the store, you have to make it an aspirational experience. When I opened Chanel in London, they were happy. People would go, “Oh, I just came in to see it. It’s so beautiful.” And you leave with a positive attitude toward the brand. Now, you don’t really get that online. You don’t go like, “Wow.” It’s almost clinical—I want to see the clothes and I want to assess them and I want to see which direction fashion’s heading in. It’s very different from what I do, which is trying to make an environment where the whole package is really desirable so that those four people who leave the door, hopefully all four of them want to go back, all four of them will say, “God, that was a fabulous experience.” I get fan e-mails from a lot of my stores, just all over the world, but particularly the Chanel in London. If I do a really gorgeous one. We just opened a Chanel in Hamburg. It got a slew of e-mails. People are like, “Oh! Love this, love that.” And they were really specific. “I loved that gold coffee table in the showroom!” It’s so funny. It was really cute and intimate. People never did that before, and now you just have these kinds of messages, and you do feel a little bit more in touch with the customers.

“Have you been to Bloomingdale’s lately? People push you. I mean, they just push you. I guess if you like subways…”

That’s good.

Yeah, it’s good, and I’m telling you what the brands want me to do. Of course they want me to present the merchandise in a beautiful way and make as many sales as possible, but it is very much now considered almost an advertising event for the brand. In the old days it wasn’t advertising—you just had to sell the stuff. That attitude for the luxury is: Don’t just press and make them sell. Present it beautifully. Don’t make it rushed. Don’t make it pushed. Make the shopping experience more what you said it was in the old days. I’m really proud of you having said, “I used to browse through Barneys,” because I created Barneys for that very reason—browsing with a mixture of cafés and where it would be great to go.

Have you been in lately?

No, I won’t go in to see that dreadful gray floor since they pulled out my mosaics. It’s appalling.

[Barneys CEO] Mark [Lee] told me he tried everything to save it, but he felt too much damage had been done to the mosaic to restore it to what it was.

I had done it just like Liberty of London, which lasted 100 years. Didn’t even last 20. It’s really telling, no? But the trend, where it’s going, I have no idea because it always moves so much faster than I think. I haven’t gotten new directions from my clients recently as they’re pursuing different directions. Remember, I do for older brands what are called the “star boutiques.” If Vuitton is building 40 stores this year, I’ll do three at the very top, the largest ones, where we set new aesthetic directions that the others follow. We have a new designer at Vuitton. Obviously, Raf [Simons] is the new designer at Dior.

Tell me how that works. There’s so much behind-the-scenes coverage of fashion shows and designers. I think people have a pretty good idea of how a fashion designer works and what their process is. But what you do, I think it’s a bit more mysterious, right?

I’m not telling anybody because I’ve got a unique career here and I make a hell of a lot of money. Are you crazy? I’m not going to give tips to a young architect! Tell them to go fuck themselves. I don’t know. [laughs] It’s taken a looooong time to get here, buddy!

But, I mean, how does it start? The CEO or an executive comes to you and says, “We want to do…”

It’s always at the top. It’s the top of the company. Any company that the top doesn’t approach me, we don’t even return the phone call. It’s from the top. I’m the head of my company, I expect the head of theirs. And we have pretty serious discussions about where the brand is going, and I work very closely with their advertising teams and the visual merchandising teams and the designers’ direction, because in today’s world you’ve got to all pull in the same exact direction. You can’t have, like, a crowded visual merchandising designer and then a minimalist clothing designer. That’s not going to work. I always make boards and I go, “Have I got this right?” Is this brand more interested in quality or glamour? We get our kind of what I call “brand values.” Every brand has different values of what they’re really interested in. And it is interesting because each of my brands I always have treated like a private residential client, as different people, and I’m just doing another home for their personality. Because they go, “Oh, how can you do so many different looks? You’re doing 12 retail stores.” I go, “Well, I’ve got 12 retail clients—no two homes look alike.” In fact, if I did, someone might confuse me with, I don’t know, Mario Buatta. No, but none of my homes look the same, and I’m not interested in rubber-stamping an aesthetic as in a Richard Meier and white metal for 25 years. I suppose if you want to establish a brand, that’s one way to do it and have people buy your look. I don’t do that—I’m more interested in a little bit of input. I’m like a psychiatrist, digesting it and spitting it out with a visual equation, and that’s what I find kind of fun … And in terms of trends in retail boutiques, I can, if I may, just give you a brief analysis of where I see that. You’ve got what I call the “young kids.” I mean, the Alexander Wangs, the J.W. Andersons, and all. They’re all going to a sort of minimalism. Easy concept, one-concept stores, young kid stores, that kind of minimalism. Then you’ve got another trend, which is a kind of maximilism and throw everything into it, which is like Dover Street Market. And it’s not just Dover Street that’s doing that, where they visually give you so much chaos that you’re entertained or amused. What that’s done, by having that split, is for us, we have to be dreadfully careful because we never in life in anything want to be in the middle. So the big brands are pretending to either go this way or this way. If you’re in the middle, then you’re a department store, and that’s going the wrong way. You’ll see the young kids’ boutiques opening up all over. I even call Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent one of the young kids’ boutiques. The concept is really simple—white marble and stainless steel.

Are you surprised at how successful that concept’s been at Saint Laurent?

I don’t think it has anything to do with the shops. I think it has to do with the product. And I’d say on that one, I think the shops are probably not long-lived. I don’t know. But, I mean, wherever you have good product, you’re going to do OK. This trend of the young kids’ shops, not more than two or three colors and pretty simplistic—remember, those shops are really small. Can you imagine if you had 30,000 feet of that look? That’s not going to work! [laughs] The [Saint Laurent] one in Paris is four rooms, so it’s OK. All these young kids’ shops are really small—1,000 feet, maybe one is 2,000. And it was even the same when Jil Sander did her thing. These were really small stores. And I remember when she did 57th Street, it was the first minimalist look and it was the same on five floors. That store was never successful. The one in Paris, which was two floors, was wildly successful. And she had five floors of beige stone with one rod on five floors. It didn’t work. So minimalism is great for young kids—it’s great experimentally and it’s really fun because you get one simple idea and you get it out there and it’s really clear and it’s good. It doesn’t work for more complex brands that have real depth of merchandise, and you can’t compare companies that are $100 million a year in sales to ones that are, you know, 10 billion. There’s a big gulf.

How much of what you do is art versus science? It sounds like it’s more art, the way you’ve described it so far, but I don’t know how much research you have about consumer patterns or what makes a consumer spend more.

I hate marketing and I hate marketers. I really, really do. Don’t ever put a McKinsey report in front of me because all that tells you is what has been. And when you get the list of questions that they ask, the questions are always slanted to give you a certain answer, and I find these people are really off-trend and they try to create big sensations to earn their very high fees. I’m happy that they can get high fees, [but] I find that it’s a bunch of kids from college, and when they present things to my very big brands, it’s very interesting because all of us go, “Really? Really? Really? Oh, oh, did you go to the store? Did you ask the person that?” I have to say, I never look at that shit. And I think that’s for followers and I want to be a leader and I want to do something good. And if you don’t like it, OK, go to another store. You cannot be an artist and try to imagine what people want painted for them. That’s deaf. Do your work and do it well and hopefully people will like it. You can ask all of my clients. Don’t show Peter a marketing report. It’s more art than science. Having said that, retail design is incredibly precise. And I’ve learned over my 30-year career, if you move a belt counter sometimes 4 feet, you can double sales. It’s crazy. Adjacencies, amounts … We had a certain brand of belt business that was enormous. I mean, their annual belt business alone was bigger than every one of these companies put together. It was so funny. It was so many hundreds of millions. So we thought, OK, let’s try one shop. We had a room this size, just a belt room, thousands of belts, just fabulous. Let’s try to double that business. What happened? Sales went right down. We went back to having little belt departments like this. It’s so crazy. You need a lot of experience—retail is not for the inexperienced. It’s really not. I can give you so many stories—how long a scarf counter should be, at which point people get bored, at which point they go, “No, this isn’t Hermès anyway.” There has been, in my experience, a lot of trial and error, and you can correct things by the minutest changes. As I said, if you just take that belt counter that was here and you just move it 4 feet here … It’s nuts! I’ve seen watch businesses double by having the watch counter put next to this certain small-leather counter. We did this in Hong Kong, and it was like, “Are you kidding?” They went, “We’re not kidding. We don’t know why our watch sales in the last three months just doubled.” I mean, what happened? Did everybody lose their watches? Adjacencies really count.

Are there any tricks that you do to make this happen?

Well, I kill chickens before every store opening and I do other things I can’t talk about it. No, you must learn by trial and error, and I’ve just about tried everything. [laughs] So many other architects now are entering the retail field, so many, and I’m very amused because there are some very big names. It may not be as precise as building a hospital, but I got to tell you, You really don’t know what you’re doing. I do, and that’s why I have the big brands. I try to get the kids to do it and it takes years of training and it’s five to seven years before they’re really retail experts. It is not intuitive. You have to learn it. It’s not intuitive. It’s not just add another 3 feet of handbags and you’ll make more sales. It isn’t.

And this is not something that technology can change or make easier?

You know, Prada tried that downtown with technological try-on rooms where you could see yourself on a computer. The computers lasted three days. They tried the glass. They tried computers. This whole thing of see-yourself-in-the-clothes? It’s a gimmick. It’s over. Computers are gimmicks. People need to try clothes on. Clothes don’t cost $10 anymore, they cost $10,000. You have to take your time. You have to know what you’re doing … One definite trend in luxury brands is try-on rooms getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. Try-on rooms for women in London, these are now like bedrooms in an apartment. Women don’t want to go into little boxes because they’re making very heavy decisions and they want to take their time. The average try-on time at Louis Vuitton in New York is now over two hours. You go in there, you’re taking your clothes in, you’re investing a lot of time, you have four or five dresses to try on, you’re maybe going to go home with two, you want to make the right decisions. And it’s not a small decision if you’re going to walk out with a $32,000 check. We’ve got to make that try-on room an experience. Always have tables, sometimes sofas if we can or at least two chairs. They very often shop with a friend, or a mother shops with her daughter—we find women shop in clusters quite a lot, so very comfortable seating right outside the try-on for their friends. So the try-on experience is something that I’ve been focusing on the last three years and that has changed a lot … It’s actually a hideously awkward thing. It’s an awkward thing. You’re taking your clothes off and standing there in your drawers with your socks on. Now, that’s not pretty. And you can’t tell me that’s elegant—unless you’re a sort of Gisele Bündchen. It’s not a pretty experience. And women are standing there in front of a three-way mirror looking at themselves in their undies, you know what I’m saying? So, it’s that part I find very crucial and I’ve been focusing on.

What about the mirrors? I kind of feel you always think you don’t look as good in the mirror in the store as you think you look in the mirror at home. Is that just because you’re in a different environment?

Well, there’s an old retail joke I’ll tell you from the beginning of my retail experience. You never want to put more than a very short side mirror for women because if it’s a very big one and she sees her full bum, 9 out of 10 will say, “My bum doesn’t look good in this. I’m not taking it.” So we try to direct you to just see your front, which looks rather good. But the view from behind can be a bit telling.

“I hate marketing and I hate marketers. Don’t ever put a McKinsey report in front of me because all that tells you is what has been.”

And what about the store assistants? That’s a huge part of the experience, right? Do you have any control over that?

That’s not my thing. That’s the brand’s. I mean, they pay commissions and high salaries, and the fight for good salespeople at the top brands is intense. Really intense. And it makes a big difference. I’ll always get from one of my lady customers, “Oh, so-and-so, my saleslady from Dior just moved to Chanel,” or vice versa. They notice instantly. There are also two kinds of retail shopping experiences, which I don’t know if you realize this. There are what’s called “local customers,” and every single store will be able to give you the statistic. And then there’s what they call “touristic.” If, on your credit card or whatever it is, your address is not local, they call that “touristic drivel,” and then local they call “localized” … Let’s say in a city like New York, you’ll take a brand and they’ll be able to tell you, “We’re 50 percent local and 50 percent touristic.” What we all discovered was, in every city, there’s one street for the locals—and here, we have Madison—and one shop for the tourists, right there on Fifth Avenue. And it’s crazy, that’s how it goes. In Paris, you’ll have Avenue Montaigne for the French and Champs-Élysées for the tourists. Every city. You have Sloane Street in London for the locals and you have Bond Street for the tourists. That’s fascinating to me.

Is that something that’s changed?

It’s become more extreme. The locals really don’t want to go to a shop that is loaded with tourists who are pushing them. The turnover of staff at these tourist shops is a lot higher. It’s really rough, the tourist shops. Whoa. People are there once and they’re typically not going to return … If you’ve got what you call a touristic shop, traffic is going to be significantly higher, and if you have textiles here [in a local shop] that take 10,000 rubs for a lifetime, this one [a tourist shop] you need 100,000 rubs because of the wear-and-tear … These are the heavy-traffic stores. The Vuitton shop on Champs-Élysées, they get more visitors than the Louvre. I mean, it’s 7,000 to 12,000 people a day. Isn’t that a scary number? Look, I don’t even know how much that is.

Do you design differently for those stores then?

Yeah. In touristic shops, you have to make the flow of traffic very easy to understand and quick because they’re going to be there once. It’s not like you have a little shop with a lady who will always know the elevator’s in the back, she takes it up to her favorite seller. You’ve got to make everything very obvious, and because they’re tourists, you don’t want signs because nobody can even read it. Everything has to be very visual. Of course, you design very differently for tourist shops. It has to be much more open, much more apparent. The flow has to really be easy and you’ve got to see things quick. You can be much more intimate and much more exclusive in what’s called a “local” shop.

Do you design very differently depending on the country? How much are you trying to establish the consistency of the brand versus what feels right for the particular country you’re in?

It’s in small ways, it’s not in large ways, because people who are wealthy enough to shop luxury brands today are quite international. The customers for all of my top 12 brands are very well traveled, and they’ll even say to me, “Oh, I like this store in Hong Kong better than the one in London.” They actually make comments like that. And I’m going, “Well, what did you like about it?” They’re like, “Oh, I loved the curtains on the third floor.” I’m like, “What?” They look and they know the differences. You can’t ever repeat yourself. I never do the mint green Prada layout and put it all over the world. I find that a bit “McDonald’s” in its approach. We always try to make every store different … [Coco] Chanel had coromandel screens all over the walls of the entrance in her apartment and we use coromandel a lot in Paris. When we were doing the first couple of boutiques in China, we went, “Coromandel Chinese screens in China?” That’s sort of, like, really selling perfume to the French. I don’t know. I can’t explain it. They’re not going to find a Chinese screen … And in fact, they say to me, the Chinese, “No, no, we want to feel the Frenchness of Chanel. We want to feel the Italian-ness of Bulgari.” It’s very interesting. Again, Bulgari has incredible Han Dynasty bronze Chinese vases in Rome, which just look spectacularly exotic and wonderful. If you put that in China, they would go, “Really? Seriously? What?” They want to feel the nationality of the brand. So those collecting patterns hold in luxury boutiques. What a European private person would collect and value as something exotic and beautiful, that usually doesn’t translate back when I’m doing Chanel in Thailand or Taiwan. But those are the cultural differences you have to be sensitive to.

Ronnie Cutrone, Leather Biker Jacket, 2010; Lee Quinones, Leather Biker Jacket, 2010; Nate Lowman, Leather Biker Jacket, 2010; all from the One Way: Peter Marino exhibit at the Bass Museum of Art.

You mentioned the customer now is so well traveled. Everyone talks about the “one percent.” Have you seen a change from the rich to the superrich?

The superrich don’t go to stores—they have couture, and [the couture houses] go to them. There’s no change. The superrich are not going through dress racks. They’re having Joel [Arthur] Rosenthal custom-make jewelry for them and they’re having Dior custom-make dresses and they’re having custom-made shoes. That’s not who we are doing boutiques for. The superrich dress a little bit different from you and me. [laughs]

How are you able to work for Chanel and Dior and Zegna? I mean, that’s pretty unique, Peter.

Yeah. [laughs]

It is unique. I’m not sure I can mention anyone else who…

…has those kinds of conflicting things and will do Bulgari and Graff jewelry and those big competitors. I believe my clients know I don’t copy or repeat myself. But I am really creative and I’ve got to give them new design solutions that are tailor-made. I mean, sometimes it gets snarky, but it’s usually from some dreadfully mid-level executive who says, “Oh, there’s that chair in Vuitton—it’s the same arm as the one you did in Dior.” And I’m like, “What?” It’s like they’re going, “Well, your shoe has a heel and so does mine.” What? But it’s usually some snarky, mid-level person who’s trying to score points with the boss, and the boss just says, “Shut up.” No, but I keep them distinct, and in our office each brand has a separate room where we keep the brand and the core and the values and the products separate from the other one. We don’t even mix teams. I don’t want the same one thinking on two different things. We’ve got really distinct teams, and as I said, Mrs. Smith really doesn’t want to see her sofa in Mrs. Watson’s living room. She really doesn’t. Not when she’s paying these kinds of fees! So, you can respect the brands, too. But I’m really proud because I think I’m really good at what I do. I mean, considering our waiting list of 17 brands that want us to work for them, I think I must be really good at what I do.

There are brands you’ll turn down?

Well, I love that I’m forced to, ones that I would love to work for, but I just go, you know, I’ve got to be realistic. We’ve got a staff of 185. I really don’t want to grow anymore. And I said that at 100. [laughs] And I’m still involved in every project. I mean, I’m designing, and there’s only so much I can do. We’re forced to turn people down.

Tell me about Boon the Shop.

Boon the Shop is Mrs. Chung, who is the niece of Mr. Lee. It’s quite exciting for us because we’re building these two white marble buildings in Korea and it was fascinating. She said, “I have followed your career since Barneys.” And she pulled out a portfolio of the original Barneys photos and said, “Oh, you created a brand and it was lifestyle and you created everything,” and I haven’t since Barneys done a multibrand store. I’ve only worked with individual brands because I basically swore never to do one again. It’s hell on earth trying to satisfy the retailer and the 50 designers who have shops. And it’s inevitably a very mixed message. It’s very, very hard to get good architecture in a mixed-brand store. But Mrs. Chung convinced me that I could and that I would have the opportunity to design the architecture and the interiors, which is really what I love to do. I love the whole package. I love doing the architecture, I love doing the interiors, I love doing the furniture, I like doing the lighting, I like doing the graphics, I like doing the whole package. And this will be the first multibrand store I’ve done since Barneys in 1990, so it was like a 23-year breath and it’s exciting for me to see how I will create another brand via an aesthetic formula. I’ll take you later to the room to show you a couple of renderings. I think it’s incredibly beautiful. It’s very contemporary and it is a store for the next 20 years. And it has only two materials, which is either very rough concrete or very beautiful white marble. And then the interior, I have blackened steel fixtures. I think it’s quite beautiful.

“I never do the mint green Prada layout and put it all over the world. I find that a bit ‘McDonald’s’ in its approach.”

Some people say maybe in the future the store will be almost like a gallery or something—you won’t actually do the buying there. You might just go to see some of the product, and then you’ll buy at home on the computer. Do you see it going in that direction at all?

No, I really don’t. I see computer buying really for socks and undies and T-shirts and things you don’t give a shit [about]. If I need a pair of tennis shorts, I’ll buy them online. I don’t really care. Not going to go and try on a pair and see how my bum looks. Who cares? But for things that you care about—I mean, a jacket and a pair of trousers, you’ve got to try them on. I don’t think anything’s changed in that regard. It’s very interesting—online art-buying. They’ve got Paddle8. Up to $10,000, people go, “Yeah, I’ll buy online. I suppose so. Who cares?” Anything more than [that], you buy a painting online that you haven’t seen with your eyes, I think you’re out of your mind. I don’t know what else to say. They’ve got Net-a-Porter, which makes it really easy that you can just return it. It’s a lot of hassle, buying and returning, buying and returning. My daughter says, “Oh, I love Net-a-Porter because I try it on, and if I don’t like it I send it back.” I said, “No, what you do is go to Dad’s office and give it to the boy who Fed Ex-es it back, is what you do. Not everybody can do that. That’s really not fair.”

I wanted to ask you about your look because it’s obviously very distinctive, but it also seems to me it’s something in the way of personal branding. I don’t know if you look at it that way, but it’s something that I think everybody is doing now, so maybe you were a little ahead of that.

It’s … interesting. [laughs] I’ve got my look, but I don’t look at it as branding because I don’t sell lipstick or perfume and it doesn’t get me anything. Do you know what I mean? I don’t sell anything, so it’s very funny. People say, “Do you want to do this interview in a magazine? Do you want to do this TV interview?” I go, “Why? It’s not going to get me the kind of clients that I need.” They go, “In order to get you famous!” And I go, “But for what?” I don’t sell lipstick. I don’t sell perfume. I don’t even sell jeans, Dirk. I don’t sell anything. So, I have a personal image, but I think that’s because I’m from an art background and I’m an artist and I think most artists do have personal images. I consider myself more in that category of the way an artist had a look. Certainly Andy [Warhol] with his blond wig thought that one through a lot. [laughs]

It’s a personal thing.

Yeah. Publicity doesn’t really get me anything. Clients are not going to hire me for a $100 million building because I have a brand. They really want the product.

Have you had any pushback, maybe from some of these mid-level executives? Were they shocked by the way you dress?

Well, yes, that level is shocked by the way I dress. But you find that the owners, who are really used to dealing with creative people all the time, they don’t even notice. Do you know what I mean? They’re really used to dealing with creative designers. I will say it creates quite a stir in the Middle East. [laughs]

When do you sleep?

That’s why God invented chemistry.

Originally published: Style.com, December 2, 2014