>> We get plenty of insight into the minds of Marc Jacobs and Karl Lagerfeld, but as for the whimsical world of Alber Elbaz, there's not such an easy entree. 

A couple of weeks ago at the DNR/WWD CEO Summit, the designer delivered the keynote speech, revealing that he rushes home to watch Project Runway and works himself sick — literally — all while carrying on with his trademark wit.  Here's more:

He thinks of creating fashion like making French food.

"It’s like wonderful food, but with too much butter. I cut the butter from the recipe, and what I am trying to do with the clothes is taking all the know-how, the tradition, the secret of French couture but trying to update it."

He has a very supportive boyfriend.

"My boyfriend told me [of speaking], ‘Alber, don’t be very nervous, because you are not a CEO, so you don’t have to sound smart.'  I thought that this may be the biggest problem of our industry, that we don’t have to sound smart."

After Tom Ford ousted him at Yves Saint Laurent, he thought about leaving fashion.

At the time, [Alber] contemplated . . .  becoming a doctor, because, he admitted, he loved hospitals, loved the food there and loved nurses.

When he's starting a new collection, he often sleeps only an hour a night.

"You don’t know what it is that you’re going to do, and you don’t know what it is that you’re going to tell. And it’s very scary, those nights. Then I wake up, it’s three in the morning, I go to my kitchen, I make a triple espresso and I go to my workroom and I start working. There is nothing more scary than just a blank page.”

Ideas in hand, he checks into the Hotel de Crillon and doesn't leave until the collection is done.

“When I do sketch, I try to sketch with music.  When I put on classic music, it always goes into pink and flowers, and when I go with metal, it ends up being leather and black. I decided to just shut off the music and I put on CNN or Fox News and I hear all these disasters around the world in 30 minutes, and it feels so wonderful being in Paris, and that’s when everything starts."

"Those nights that I am at the hotel, most of the time I am feeling sick.  I am having temperatures, my nose runs and it’s almost like I am fainting.”
*image: source