Agnès B: Well, I put it on at night, of course. I don’t like being woken up at night and I’ve got too many friends who might call me at whatever time.

Agnès: I had lots of people over at mine last night until very late, so I had to get my head straight this morning… I had quite a few things to think through and organize.

Agnès: I’m not a morning person at all. I don’t like going to bed; I have to force myself to go to bed, but then I still need eight hours sleep.

Agnès: I’ll go in later, but it doesn’t matter because we’ve done the collection, and they’re doing the buying, so it’s less…

Agnès: No, it’s not less interesting, it’s just less my job than doing the actual collection.

Agnès: It still interests me because the problem is, and it’s the same in all houses, I’ve always known it, that the sales department always has trouble accepting new ideas and new things. They’re
always looking back at what sold well last year.

Agnès: It was the first time I’d seen him in 30 years.

Agnès: I felt totally out of place there. It really wasn’t enjoyable; I didn’t think it was cool at all.

Agnès: No one came to say hello; it’s crazy!

Agnès: It simply isn’t a world that I know. There was Alber Elbaz who came to say hi to me; I think he was the only one though. I was on Jérôme Dreyfuss’s table; he’s very nice. We didn’t know the others though. I think we’re all in a bubble. It depends, maybe it’s different with the younger ones.

Agnès: You know, I am very distanced from it all; I don’t often read fashion magazines; I never go out shopping. I don’t know about that, I really don’t. I only ever wear what I’ve made. And in fact, I like to protect myself, to not really know what everyone else is doing. I think it’s the street that creates
trends anyway. I never work with any documentation, for example. It’s all instinctive.

Agnès: Not one. Sometimes I put my own photos onto clothes or an engraving from my grandmother’s house or a sculpture. We weave them together; we do lots of things. I’ve been doing photo dresses for a long time now. And it’s funny because they’ve never appeared in a magazine.

Agnès: If you don’t pay for advertising, there’s no point; the press don’t even bother turning up to the show anymore.

Agnès: You know it is. Are we even allowed to talk about that?

Agnès: It’s impossible for young designers or someone like me who was carried along by the press because they always knew how to see the new in what I was doing. I started my career at Elle with Hélène Lazareff. With her, there was never question of taking freebies or making any compromises.

Agnès: Hélène Lazareff was very, very straight. There were no freebies and above all, you had to be absolutely objective so you could see what was new. Now it’s all happening on the Internet anyway, but the odd press cutting every now and then would be nice all the same.

Agnès: I am, among other places. I love the street. I love people and simple things that aren’t a pain to put on… like the costumes I did for William Klein’s film, Polly Maggoo.

Agnès: Yes! I was only 22, 23 years old, working at Dorothée Bis. You can see the outfits in my book. With lots of photos of clothes I took myself.

Agnès: No, it’s just that I love taking photos; it’s such a complete job. Like choosing the person to wear the clothes; I love models who are also friends or who have other jobs altogether. I love amateurism, because it means you love it. Maybe I get too personal, but people expect me to be personal. When they see me picking up the camera to take photos, everyone is happy, because that means it’s going to be simple, quick and easy.

Agnès: I announced the collaboration with Nekfeu, when I was supposed to introduce Laure-Hélène Vaudier, who works for us. Every season I invite a new designer to show, to give them a bit of exposure. We manufacture the clothes for them and then they go into the shops. It’s about helping to launch them and getting their names out there.

Agnès: I said to her, do what you want, be yourself, I have faith in you, take the fabrics you want, work in the atelier, make your pictures. I don’t want to see anything until the day of the show. It’s better that way.

Agnès: Because then they are responsible for their own thing and will take it all the way. I want to let them create.

Agnès: At least two months.

Agnès: It’s such a pleasure to give them a chance to show their work. I don’t have a studio, I don’t have people working with me or people who design for me, and I just can’t put my name on a garment that I haven’t personally designed.

Agnès: I’ve never done it, that’s just how it is.

Agnès: Not me.

Agnès: No, not us, we don’t work like that. I simply cannot put my name on something if I didn’t do it. Perhaps that’s something from my childhood, the ethics of Versailles. My education was very much about respect for others, so I will not put my name onto something designed by someone else.

Agnès: No, apart from the artists’ T-shirts.

Agnès: I don’t have a studio, I told you that. There’s the girl who takes care of fabrics, and the one who deals with buttons and zips, a girl in charge of jersey, and another in charge of knits, but I do
everything myself.

Agnès: Now it’s fine; the collection is done. I’ll be getting on with the men’s summer line soon; I’ve already started putting things aside for that. A collection is six months of work and every three months I have a collection, so I’m always at it.

Agnès: In fact, I am always doing two collections at once.

Agnès: Of course it’s tiring. I would like to find someone to replace me afterwards.

Agnès: Like I-don’t-know-who. I don’t know Ann Demeulemeester; I don’t know what she does. I’ve never even seen one of her collections. Well, I may have seen pictures, but I don’t know her.

Agnès: Believe me, I don’t know anyone in fashion!

Agnès: Completely! I’m much more involved with the art world. I’m the president of the hip-hop centre in Les Halles; I am passionate about that. I’m the president of the Friends of the
Beaux-Arts. All very different sorts of self-expression. I’m so much more involved in all that, and I’ve had my gallery since 1984. I have lots of artist friends in different places from Japan to New York and LA, and spend much more time with them than any fashion people. I just don’t know them at all, apart from Castelbajac because we started at the same time and he’s someone I really like. I was very fond of Azzedine, too, but I wouldn’t go to his dinners. We’d kiss when we saw each other, because I’d known him for so long.

Agnès: You know, I didn’t even recognize Isabel Marant when I saw her at the Elysée dinner. I thought she was Mme. Macron’s assistant!

Agnès: I wanted to talk to her about a law that doesn’t work. At the moment we’re not allowed to work at nights even though that’s what you do at collection time. We used to have dinner and then continue working afterwards. Now we get inspected at peak times, when we have the most work. It’s like Easter eggs – chocolate-makers have a lot more work at Easter! It needs to be understood that our needs change during the year, and people get paid and then given time off later.

Agnès: Yes, it’s exciting when we’re together – we listen to music and have fun, and they see me playing dolls with the models. Everything we’ve worked on arrives and I can put it all together,
then think about what shoes, what jewellery, what hat. During those two days before the show I put together the looks, I ask their opinions, that’s how I work, I need their input.

Agnès: Sometimes, they’ll say, ‘Not really’ and so I’m like, ‘OK, let’s try something else’. It’s a fun time, one we all love.

Agnès: They came to inspect six months ago at 8pm, and there were employees still there, and we got fined. Now we have to pay more attention and it’s a lot less fun.

Agnès: No, I didn’t. I’ve got other things I need to discuss there, too.

Agnès: So many things. I saw this thing earlier about restaurants in these tiny villages that no longer have the right to put signs outside the village because it supposedly looks ugly. It’s complete
bullshit, like making retired people pay when there are so many rich people in France who don’t even pay their taxes here! There really is a lot to do. But I am happy with our new president.

Agnès: Yes, possibly. I was at a party in New York and this stranger, who was Ryan, came up to me and just showed me these 10 photos he had in his back pocket. And then that was how I ended up showing them in Los Angeles in a boutique I had on North Robertson Boulevard. There was a wall in there to put things on and where I have always hung art as much as possible. So, I had the photos printed and voilà. Then he went off to some other gallery I don’t know where. But [art dealer and gallery owner] Yvon Lambert always says: ‘You discover them and we do the work afterwards.’ My artists are often shown later in more prestigious galleries – that’s just how it is.

Agnès: Yes, but I love that.

Agnès: I don’t resent the artists for that, more the gallery owners, who sometimes don’t even bother writing me a letter to tell me. I won’t cite any names…

Agnès: No I won’t, but it’s happened so many times. The artists think they will be better taken care of, but that isn’t always the case.

Agnès: Yes, of course they do.

Agnès: No.

Agnès: It depends; there was more expensive, but there was also cheaper.

Agnès: When we have someone unknown, then we price low, and they are often unknowns to start with. Then later…

Agnès: I’ve wanted to do a Lartigue show for a long time because I think it’s interesting to know what went on before, especially for young photographers today. I felt it was educational to see how at the start of the 20th century, there was someone doing photographs with these beautiful texts. I think that show was a photography lesson for younger photographers. That freedom, that poetry, that lust for life, I’ve always found it incredibly important to show all that.

Agnès: We established the prices with the Donation Jacques Henri Lartigue.

Agnès: There was a selection: vintage prints, recent prints, previously unseen images that had never been printed before. They had found negatives and we worked very closely with the Donation Lartigue.

Agnès: I don’t do that. I don’t know what it all means. I know what I can pay for work by an unknown artist. Like when I was showing Nan Goldin in 1991. I did her first slide show, we went to the cinema in Bastille and I said, ‘Why don’t we project your photos and you talk out loud about how you feel about each one?’ We were both almost in tears, but wow, it was beautiful. It was the first time she did that. It was just so instinctive, amateur sure, but it pushed me to do other things in a different way. When I say I’m pragmatic, it’s true, but then I am also very instinctive with the artists I communicate with. We have a very delicate dialogue. Very simple. For example, they always talk to me about their childhood, Basquiat included.

Agnès: I bought a drawing in his studio in 1983, a stunning self-portrait, which had been pinned up with two drawing pins for years.

Agnès: Yes, because I had seen a canvas at the Paris Biennale in 1982 with his name, and I said to myself, I’d like to meet him. It wasn’t at all expensive; I put the pins through the holes that Basquiat had already made. I didn’t know anyone else in Paris who’d heard of him and since then I have bought other drawings by him, as well as Plastic Sax, a fabulous yellow, blue and turquoise painting. I remember his last show at Yvon’s; it was about six months before he died. ‘So that’s you,’ he
said to me, because he’d bought himself an agnès b. by Warhol T-shirt for his birthday, which I only found out afterwards. It’s funny, he loved agnès b. white shirts. ‘So that’s you,’ he said,
with all his height, his hair, his brown suit and white shirt, black tie, very chic, very beautiful, like in the photo. And I said, ‘Yes, this is me’. Then I left and thought I wouldn’t see him again. But in fact, he was waiting for me in the pizzeria across the road and he called out to me, ‘Agnès! Agnès!’ So I said to myself, ‘Well, I’ll go and see him’ and we ended up talking for two hours instead of going to Castelbajac’s dinner. The next night he called me, wanting me to join him at the Crillon. I said, ‘No, sorry, I can’t’. The next night the same thing, then he trashed his hotel room. Yvon recently told me that he had fallen in love with me. I’d said, ‘I’ll see you in New York, I’ll be coming soon, maybe we’ll see each other then’. I tried to say that to him because he was incredibly seductive, and we’d talked and talked. It really was marvellous; we got on so well. Similar to Harmony Korine, actually.

Agnès: I could have done, but I had a new lover at the time and I was too complicated. I lived here with four children. It was complicated. I wasn’t just going to rock up to the Crillon at 4am. I wasn’t
in the mood.

Agnès: No, but I was pretty taken aback all the same.

Agnès: There are some who come and see me like that, yes. Like Claire Tabouret, for example, I knew her at the Beaux-Arts and I loved her work. I’m never disappointed by artists – it’s crazy!

Agnès: I went to the Louvre a lot as a child. I was in love with the Man with a Glove by Titian.He’s beautiful, isn’t he? I think I was 10 years old.

Agnès: Gosh, I don’t know. I could easily have stayed in the Rue du Jour doing my own dyeing and selling clothes that hadn’t even dried. That’s how it was at the start, people would leave with dyed
petticoats that were still damp stuffed into plastic bags.

Agnès: It was with my daughters’ father, my second husband, and then the Japanese man who came to see us, and the development in Japan in the early 1980s. They adored my stuff and still do – now all the Japanese kids want agnès b. caps. It’s funny how things come around.

Agnès: They’re popular because of the b. from agnès b. which makes it look like being a member of a business whose ethics and vision they like. They do buy other things, though. Our original customers are in their 50s now, but agnès b. is still very trendy in Japan, so there’s definitely a revival. I’m really well-known there; they all kiss me and try to grab my hair. It’s crazy over there.

Agnès: I can’t say it was something I was looking for, but because of it, I’ve been able to do lots of other things and I can help lots of people. I can have my foundation and the endowment funds. I
truly believe that the rich have to share their wealth, and I want to say, in a nutshell: the rich should share! What are they going to do with all their money when they’re dead? So many people could live off their taxes if they paid them. But instead they die with all that money. What are they going to do with it? As my grandmother always used to say: ‘Shrouds don’t have pockets.’ I love that expression. Anyway, I believe in art now.

Agnès: No, because I’m doing things my way against all the odds and maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. I really need to find someone as determined as me, but it’ll happen one of these days.

Agnès: Yes, me. I am designer and CEO. I am the designer at agnès b. and my son is the director, Étienne Bourgois, one of the twins I had with Christian Bourgois. We’re a family maison; we don’t have banks holding us by the purse strings.

Agnès: No, no.

Agnès: We have never advertised; I’m completely against advertising; I hate advertising. Advertising is stupid and makes you stupid. May 1968 affected me, but even before, I didn’t like it. I was living with Philippe Michel, the father of my eldest daughter; he was a big ad man, and I think what interested him was everything I said against advertising. It stimulated and attracted him. He saw how I was. I have never done any advertising.

Agnès: My shows, Instagram, the Internet, but it’s not very well done. I need
to take care of that actually, because I don’t think it looks good.

Agnès: Because we tell them to, so the audience has enough time to have a good look.

Agnès: Really?

Agnès: More importantly – I mean, I don’t know but based on the little I see, because literally I never even watch the shows on TV – but I find they’re like robots; they’re all the same. What I want is to show human beings, which isn’t the same job at all.

Agnès: Exactly.

Agnès: Absolutely not. I see it as a game; I have fun, and I’m not at all stressed out. I wasn’t stressed, did you notice that? I think there are much more serious things in life. Like when someone close to you is ill.

We still make them. We sell them to help people who have AIDS, but don’t have enough for cigarettes or candy. We’ve been doing it forever. As soon as the AIDS epidemic started, I was in the midst of it all, with people who were ill, people who were dying. Between the drugs and AIDS, the 1980s was a slaughter in artistic circles. And straight away I said, ‘OK, we’re going to put jars of condoms in the shops’. It used to cost 10 francs for a condom and I thought that was outrageous. I thought that everyone would do the same, but we’re still the only ones with jars of condoms.

Agnès: Yes, I decided that. I was very close to the organization Act Up. We did agnès b. with Act Up; I did T-shirts for them, too. I was lying on the ground with Pierre Bergé in front of the Louvre; we were all lying on the ground in the rue de Rivoli.

Agnès: It still does; I’m very sensitive to pain.

Agnès: Yes, I can get cross about things, like Sarajevo. Nearly four years in Europe, a whole community besieged in a city in the 20th century – it just knocked me sideways. I said to myself: ‘How do you cope when your child is crying and hungry, and you’ve got nothing to give them – no water, no heating, no food.’ There was this guy who worked for me in the shop, who I really like, and we said we have to do something. So he founded Première Urgence, filled up lorries in the western suburbs of Paris and drove to Sarajevo in the middle of winter.

Agnès: I had a lot of support from the press because Elle, Marie Claire and Jardin des Modes all instantly saw what was happening and that it was quite unlike anything else at the time.

Agnès: Yes, then came the gallery; then there were the people I was dressing; then there was Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs: Tarantino sent his wardrobe mistress to the shop in LA.

Agnès: I don’t know, but Harvey Keitel still has his jacket with the bullet holes in. He told me they found it in storage and he wanted me to exhibit it in Paris. I’m great friends with Harvey; I like him a lot.

Agnès: Since Reservoir Dogs, he’s kept that jacket, in T051 anthracite grey that doesn’t crease. Everyone loved it because a suit that doesn’t crease is pretty good, for aeroplanes and all that.

Agnès: No, to begin with, I said to myself, I’m going to be peaceful: I’ll spend my days in the shop and I’ll go home at night. The apartment was painted all black, while in the shop there were birds flying around inside.

Agnès: We had 35 in the end.

Agnès: I wanted to be a museum curator when I was young, then I got married when I was 17, had the twins when I was 19 and left my husband when I was 20.

Agnès: Then I worked at Elle because they’d noticed me. I didn’t have a choice; I had no money at all, no one gave me any money. I had to make things work, so I started selling my drawings. I’d take
my bottles back for the deposit and buy two slices of ham or a tin of tuna to feed the children in the evenings. We would have a chicken every three weeks; we weren’t unhappy though. Then May
1968 happened and I was obviously in the streets. I was with my twins and my parents were saying, ‘We don’t want you to stay in Paris’, but I was like, ‘Yeah, yeah, but I’m having a great time. We’re
having fun; it’s great’.

Agnès: Nineteen seventy-six. It was unisex to begin with, workwear, anonymously designed clothes, and that’s what I loved about them. I’ve always been against the idea of consumerism, so I make clothes that can be worn for 20 years and never go out of fashion.

Agnès: Nothing superfluous that can go out of fashion. You can wear them for a very long time. This thing I’m wearing now, I’ve had it for at least 15 years.

Agnès: I do things instinctively, that’s how I work. Also, I like people and I want to make them happy. That’s the gift for me – giving other people pleasure so they’re happy with what they have. Lots of customers stop me in the street and tell me stories about their clothes. It’s really touching because a piece of clothing can be like a talisman, something that reminds you of a happy memory. A piece of clothing can mean so many things.

Agnès: I have always been the same.

Agnès: And we had to find a name, because when Elle first featured my
clothes, I was at my father’s office, which was at my grandmother’s, and the magazine asked what name to put for the credit. So I said, ‘Oh, you may as well just use Agnès B.’, like in a crime story where they don’t put the full name. I didn’t want to use Bourgois, he was a publisher, and I wasn’t going to use [my maiden name] Agnès Troublé, so I saidjust use Agnès, B, full stop, and that’s
how it happened.

Agnès: Troublé? No, and I didn’t want to take Christian’s name, and my father was a lawyer, president of the bar. I like that agnès b. just came out like that. I love ideas that come out of nowhere like butterflies. You have to catch ideas, watch out for them, and they come.

Agnès: When I got married my father offered me a rug from the Caucasus and the Larousse du XXe
siècle [encyclopedia] because he’d always seen me reading the Larousse on the rugs at home
when I was a kid, aged 8, 9 and 10. I was always reading the Larousse and so he gave me that as a wedding present, when I was 17. And then 20 years ago, I wanted to do an exhibition about irony in art, the irony in artistic creation. I thought it was very interesting, so I looked up irony in my Larousse and what do I see? The irony punctuation mark. And I thought it was beautiful, I didn’t know it existed, like a back-to-front question mark. And so that was why we called it le point d’ironie, and then we didn’t need to trademark the name because it’s in the public domain, even if no one ever remembers about the irony punctuation mark. I just loved the idea of it – instead of having a smiley, we have
the irony punctuation mark. My dream would be for it to become…

Agnès: Yes! We haven’t taken care of it; I don’t know who to ask. I wouldn’t know where to start with that…

Agnès: It was me. I love live music and I went to see him at Bercy and it was his Berlin period when he wore a brown suit with pleats.35 I gave him a pair of jeans with a note in the pocket, saying, ‘You should stick to rock’n’roll style’.

Agnès: Yes, and I think he liked it because he later went and bought four pairs of leather jeans at the agnès b. shop in London and asked me to dress him.

Agnès: Yes, a pair of agnès b. black leather jeans; I’ve been making them forever.

Agnès: I don’t know. There are also the charities we support, and Tara, the ship. She is my contribution to ecology, and has been doing oceanographic research for the past 12 years. It’s the
ship I bought with Étienne; it was Sir Peter Blake’s, the one he was killed on. I bought it from Lady Pippa Blake to continue his oceanographic research. I think we give €600,000 to fund the ship; it’s my contribution to ecology. That’s why I always say the rich should share, because I am certainly a lot less rich than others.

Agnès: There is someone who manages it, but I buy the works myself from auctions, and galleries and dealers I’m friends with. Like I did with my Warhols. Sometimes I go to artists’ studios directly, and people come and see me, too. There are lots of ways, and there’s also the Beaux-Arts.

Agnès: Of course I do! There are 135 of us; we’re like a Breton village, like Hœdic, we’re the same number as the residents of the isle of Hœdic.

Agnès: Everyone knows each other on Hœdic, especially during winter; in summer there are 3,000 people, but in winter, only 135.

Agnès: They asked me to be Hœdicaise and I said yes.

Agnès: Oh, it was very quick.

Agnès: Twenty years ago. We were in Brittany and went to the island on a day trip in a sailing boat. Then I went to the town hall and asked if there were ever any houses for sale there. And the woman there said, ‘Yes, my parents’ house is for sale’, and she gave me the key and told me where it was and told me to go visit. So I did and by 3pm, I’d agreed to buy it. It’s a small village house between two other houses.

Agnès: Yes, but it was super. It was completely brown, the doors were brown, the shutters were brown.

Agnès: Of course not! We just painted the shutters blue, the house white, and we called it Lis de Mer, and I made a little lis de mer from shells on the facade. When I go there, once I’m on the boat, I say to myself, ‘That’s it’, and it’s like I drop anchor. We have so much fun. I have some very good friends there too. The people who run the bar, the fishermen; we’ve had friends there, ever since I’ve been going. When I first went there, there was a wedding and I started laughing and dancing, and I made friends with the shopkeeper, and I am still great friends with her; I like her very much.

Agnès: Yes absolutely. I just didn’t find the Élysée very friendly; I saw everyone pushing each other for the photos.

Agnès: I would have liked to meet her. But no one introduced anyone to anyone.

Agnès: I don’t know.

Agnès: I don’t have a watch. I’ve never worn a watch, I don’t like them. I don’t even have my phone with me.