Nowadays he considers himself a lark, waking early although sometimes staying in bed to draw and read. But he is known for working late and when he travels, his entourage are usually prepared to be on call 24 hours a day. Despite this, he claims that he no longer has a social life, by which he means a red-carpet schedule. But does he have friends? "I hope so. I think so," he replies. "I have friends from a younger generation. My generation all talk about their health and I don't want that." It is one of the many disparaging comments he makes about his own age group, twice mentioning that when he was 18 he visited a fortune-teller "in a horrible apartment with fake Louis XV. A fat Turkish woman with turquoise eyes. The first time I saw her, I put everything she said on a paper and put it in a desk in my parents' house and when my father died and my mother sold the house I said, 'I want to keep my desk.' I found the envelope and everything she said had happened. 'For you, it really starts when it stops for the others.' That's what she said."
And you can't dispute that, unlike most of his peers, "it" really is all happening for him, watching him embrace Vanessa Paradis in her loose shirt and pyjama pants of beige satin ("C'est très bien. Elle est jolie comme ça?") and tease Lara Stone about whether she has enough room in her tight, Madame X- inspired gown to actually sit at the gaming tables, as he pulls up photos texted by those handmaidens of Choupette on his phone ("She is beautiful, huh? She is three and a half and she is three kilo"), all the while managing to constantly parcel out an individual morsel of his attention to everyone. "Ah, Miss Lily… a little debutante," he greets Lily Collins. He has total control of all the details, from the hair which he has sketched on the original designs (those that weren't consigned, as he puts it, "to the garbage - I work a lot for the garbage") to the make-up to the layering of costume jewellery.
And you can't dispute that, unlike most of his peers, "it" really is all happening for him, watching him embrace Vanessa Paradis in her loose shirt and pyjama pants of beige satin ("C'est très bien. Elle est jolie comme ça?") and tease Lara Stone about whether she has enough room in her tight, Madame X- inspired gown to actually sit at the gaming tables, as he pulls up photos texted by those handmaidens of Choupette on his phone ("She is beautiful, huh? She is three and a half and she is three kilo"), all the while managing to constantly parcel out an individual morsel of his attention to everyone. "Ah, Miss Lily… a little debutante," he greets Lily Collins. He has total control of all the details, from the hair which he has sketched on the original designs (those that weren't consigned, as he puts it, "to the garbage - I work a lot for the garbage") to the make-up to the layering of costume jewellery.
