Andy Warhol was a good friend of mine. We used to go to the Studio 54 nightclub together with the likes of Liza Minnelli, and we'd dance through the night.
It's high time for the art world to admit that the avant-garde is dead. It was killed by my hero, Andy Warhol, who incorporated into his art all the gaudy commercial imagery of capitalism (like Campbell's soup cans) that most artists had stubbornly scorned.
25 years ago, when I started in New York, I had the pleasure to cook for Andy Warhol. At the time, I could have traded art for food - I should have done so, because I could get his work for nothing!
I'd like to think, that were he alive today, Warhol would be painting the Housewives.
Halston was one of the hardest-working designers I have come across. The way he cut, moulded, manipulated and draped fabric was inspiring. I was submerged into the Halston subculture alongside Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor and Truman Capote. They shaped who I have become as a designer.
Ultimately Warhol's private moral reference was to the supreme kitsch of the Catholic church.
When I was growing up, all the art that touched me was lens-generated, like Gerhard Richter, or Polke, Rauschenberg, Warhol.
