I love sportswear in my own weird way. Fashion is such a personal journey for me. I'm much more of a girl that's a T-shirt, legging, layering kind of thing, and outerwear.
I love a black wedding dress.
I like the gritty parts of fashion, the design, the studio, the pictures.
I hate phones. All businesses are personal businesses, and I always try my best to get back to people, but sometimes the barrage of calls is so enormous that if I just answered calls I would do nothing else.
I don't live through my kids. But I do know what will happen in life, and I just want them well prepared.
I do think I know more about clothes than any 500 designers, because there's nothing like wearing them. You buy them, you study them, and you start to understand how they're crafted.
I do speak Mandarin, and I also relate to the hunger that China has for culture and architecture and style.
, the corsets that I did in bridal, they were trends in ready-to-wear, too. )
I brought color to bridal. There was one whole season of blush. If you think about the bareness, the illusion (fabric), the corsets that I did in bridal, they were trends in ready-to-wear, too.
I am not the sort of woman who would wear high heels with a bathing suit. Let's get that straight right now.
I always see where I didn't do things the right way. I only see the heavy lifting. That's a bit of my wisdom, if you want to call it that.
Fashion to me has become very disposable; I wanted to get back to craft, to clothes that could last.
Fashion offers no greater challenge than finding what works for night without looking like you are wearing a costume.
Even the most understated ceremony involves a certain respect for ritual and pageantry. No one plays more of a significant role than the bride's attendants.
Don't be afraid to take time to learn. It's good to work for other people. I worked for others for 20 years. They paid me to learn.
Design is about point of view, and there should be some sort of woman or lifestyle or attitude in one's head as a designer.
Brides today are increasingly sensitive to the tastes, feelings and finances of their attendants.
Bridal is always about who you are as a person and as a woman and as a lover and as a mate. People always ask me how a woman can pick just one dress. And the funny thing is they always know.
As the mother of two daughters, I have great respect for women. And I don't ever want to lose that.
All those years of skating and dancing have carried over. I can't design anything without thinking of how a woman's body will look and move when she's wearing it.
All I did my first year at Vogue was Xerox.
A woman is never sexier than when she is comfortable in her clothes.
A bride should look at everything she possibly can...just so she can experiment and see what makes her really feel beautiful or glamorous or classical or whatever she desires to be on that particular day.
Although in skating you compete with other people, anyone who achieves a certain level of success is first and foremost competing against themselves. And for me the idea that I could always do better, learn more, learn faster, is something that came from skating. But I carried that with me for the rest of my life.
Certainly a big challenge for me with evening-wear is to make it look modern and artistic and avant-garde. The very concept of a ball gown is not in itself a modern concept, and women need to wear that for a certain presence in Hollywood. I'm also aware that a starlet might go to more than one place that night so the piece could also offer, maybe not a revolution, but an evolution.
Figure skating has been a great influence for me. I took dance at the School of American Ballet, which helped my own skating. And whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror.
