There's no way I can get rid of it unless I shave my head and dye it black.

[Vogue Italia issue] made some noise, but, unfortunately, we are the same as before. People, in the panic of the recession, don't dare to put a girl of color in their campaign, full stop. Nor of any other race. It's a shame. It's very sad.

Under her Prince Valiant coiffure and big, omnipresent sunglasses, Wintour resembles the transvestite razor slasher of Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill, while the ex-model Coddington has a face in which the lines of passion and heartbreak are deeply etched ... Scary as he shows her to be, Cutler does probe Wintour’s hard surface, suggesting her demeanor is rooted in a titanic inferiority complex.

I’ve adopted her as a godmother to me in fashion because she’s the one who first took me to the shows in Paris, she’s the one who’s always treated me like a designer when she reviewed my collections and told me the truth about what was right and what was wrong. She’s one of the most ambitious, most talented, most driven people I’ve ever met.

I admit that thanks to a career choice that required not much more than showing up with clean hair and shaved legs, I have a bit of an inferiority complex in the education department. Or in plain speak: I feel the need to constantly prove I’m not some dumb model.

I do tend to look like a fish out of water sometimes in L.A. It's buttoned-up, and yet that's breaking the rules here. You should see the looks I get at the gym, the way some guys look at me when I'm coming out on my way to work."

It’s a love-hate relationship. I would definitely prefer not to be obliged to attend certain events and parties, but I must . . . On the other hand, I have to admit that I do actually enjoy acting up to the 'diva' role that I have been allotted: after all, I am a bit of a diva, aren’t I?

She's an amazing model. She knows clothes. She has tons of energy. She would add things to the shoot that I would never have thought of. She thinks from a point of view of an editor and of a photographer, not just that of a model.

I have to tell you that I've been dressing this way since I was a young man. I was 18-years-old when I arrived in Spain, and at that time you could have a custom-made suit for eight dollars. Do you know why I almost always wear a tie? I have this complex that if I walk into a place wearing a colourful shirt someone will stop me and say, "I'm sorry, but the Latin band comes through the other door."'

I think that gay men are actually the most to blame for many of the problems in the fashion industry, like the absence of womanly curves on the runway, and the hideous, figure-assaulting trend that is the tent dress, which no women who have tits, and no straight men who have an appreciation for tits, have any use for.