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Women in the 1950s were so much sexier. That's what I aspire to look like.

I can think of a lot of women clients of mine who are well into their 50s or 60s who are still quintessentially very elegant.

In the '50s, women aspired to dress like their mothers - this polished, controlled, formal way of dressing. Then all of a sudden in the '60s, going into the '70s, they stopped dressing like their mothers.

That attitude toward women as objects may have worked for the late Sixties, but it doesn't do so now.

When the women's movement started in the 1960s, there was a vision of a future where women didn't wear makeup or worry about how their hair looked, and everybody wore sensible, comfortable clothes. It ran into an absolute brick wall.

There are some strong female performers out there. But the industry's pre-occupation with the packaging of how a woman looks has gone completely the other way, back to almost the 60s, early 70s.

When I think about old Hollywood and the glamour of those days, women like Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe, and Audrey Hepburn were not dressing the way some girls dress today. There was a certain mystery about them, and I feel like that's gone in our industry.

Women in the post-Fifties world were appendages. They existed to serve men. Their lives and concerns didn't matter, except insofar as they impinged on Important Male Things.

It took me a while to warm to the '20s costumes on 'Downton.' I love it when women accentuate their curves, and that era was all about hiding them. The shapes they wore then were in tune with female empowerment. Cutting off their hair and hiding their busts was a way of saying, 'We're equal to men!'

If you look back in history of the women who are most memorable and most stylish, they were never the followers of fashion. They were the ones who were unique in their style, breakers of the rules. They were authentic, genuine, original. They were not following the trends.