I had the fortune to evolve at a time when fashion was very important, and women dressed themselves very well. A woman who dressed very well also had a husband who would have beautiful collections of art and decorative objects.
There was this enormous burst of sculptural creative juice in the nineteenth century, and all that stuff is just so decorative. Even in pieces cast from a mold, you get a more sensuous, handmade, individual sense from it.
I love Prada shirts because they're so decorative and figure-hugging, but I also like Reiss shirts because they're clean, simple and look as if they've come off the peg from a design house.
Initially, it was the unpractical in fashion that brought me to design my own line. I felt that it was much more attractive to cut clothes with respect for the living, three-dimensional body rather than to cover the body with decorative ideas.
I like decorative, functional things that I feel comfortable in.
And I started with this: I have not painted at all my childhood. In fact, I never painted. But I helped my father who was a house painter and decorative painter. He made stage sets, he made glass paintings, he made everything.
For more than three months, I had been president and primary owner of Spellman Investigations, and I can say with complete certainty that I had more power in this office as an underling. My title, it seemed, was purely decorative. I was captain of an unfashionable and sinking ship.
A fun pair of earrings is basically the finishing touch to any outfit; a nice watch is both practical and decorative, while the perfect unique bag is not only eye-catching but also timeless - it can be passed on to future generations.
In general, fashion is decorative, it's protective, it acknowledges that the world does involve conflict, and you might be attacked by assumptions, presumptions, and attitudes.
From the outset, MoMA followed the Bauhaus's strict prohibition against design that even hinted at the decorative, a prejudice that skewed the pioneering museum's view of Modernism for decades.
