Quotes from Stella McCartney

Mum was a big style icon for me: her natural sexiness and natural confidence.

I confess to being a frustrated musician.

I think the reality is that, for me, real fur is extraordinarily old fashioned. I think you look old. Even if you're 20, and you've got a real fur coat, you just look like an old, unaware, unconscious being on the planet. It's not relevant, it's not sexy, it's not fashionable, and it's not cool.

People think I'm strong, but actually I wanted to crawl away. I thought, I'm going to live in the country with my horse and I'll get a nine-to-five; I don't need this.

There's no excuse for fur in this day and age.

When you think of fashion photography, it's a dream. It's like we all want to be those women. We want to wear those dresses.

For me, women's ski wear has always been black and, again, not as feminine or sexy as I think it could look while still having the technology there.

I was never drawn just into fashion. I was drawn into it because I am really interested in serving women and providing women with solutions, trying to figure out what we need and why we need that and why we wear stuff, how it makes us feel. That was always my starting point, you know.

My fragrance is rose and amber, and I was just very specific. A lot of what I've done, at the stages I've done it, I've been a little naive, which brought with it a kind of charm. I did Stella a while ago. It's now a bit of a classic.

We have captured a luxury and richness with our fur-free fur, which is proof to the fashion industry that killing animals for the sake of fashion is unnecessary.

I did have quite a different upbringing to a lot of my peers. We all have a sort of code that we get, especially as Beatles kids. It's an unspoken sort of word of understanding. But I'm comfortable around a lot of different types of people.

As a designer I like to work with fabrics that don't bleed. That's why I avoid all animal skins.

People work better when they are afforded to be themselves

Ninety percent of the people who come to my stores have no idea I don't work with leather.

Asia has always been a really exciting part of the world for me, personally. And it actually was the first part of the world that bought my brand, strangely enough.

As a British fashion designer, it is an amazing, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be creative director of Team GB as the hosting nation of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

To work on the competition wear for the Olympics is kind of insane. As a fashion designer, you don't think to yourself, 'I'm going to get the opportunity to work with athletes at that level at the Olympic Games.' It really is such an incredible thing to have any kind of contact with as a designer.

I think the moment that I'm very proud of is building a business without using animals. And, hopefully, changing people's perception of how you can do luxury fashion.

At the end of the day I separate things; my life is my life and my work is my work.

I ride my bike, I work out, I do a bit of, er, dancey things.

If you try to create something people enjoy, and it happens to be made in a responsible way, then that's when you can really strike an incredible balance.

Modern fake fur looks so much like real fur that the moment it leaves the atelier, no one can tell it's not the real thing. And I've struggled with that.

It's one of my biggest internal struggles - the whole schooling system in London and the fact that my kids are going to a posh school. It freaks me out.

My mum and dad had creative jobs, but our family was a working family - so there wasn't an option of, 'Oh, when you're older, you're not going to have to work.'