I'm doing all that I can to prod the industry and get them to pay more attention [to larger women and petite women]. Because I find it to be reprehensible and repugnant that two populations that are so pervasive in this nation should be so badly neglected.

Call me a schoolmarm, but few things make me angrier than people not taking good care of library materials.

I will say that the high road can get so high that you can get a nose bleed, in which case you have to get off the high road.

Make it work

I've had my own moments in front of designers when I've actually said, 'You know, there's a market here for expanding your work, and here it is. And frankly, there are two markets: The women who are larger than the 12, and then there are women who are petite. And most designers that I talk to have absolutely no interest in addressing either of those populations, which I find repugnant.

I've never told anyone this, in an effort to run from my past and disguise it, I got rid of all of the scrapbooks my mother kept going back to when I was a baby. Truly. So that's why whenever talk show hosts or a producer asks for these pictures, there are barely any. My sister had a few, but that's it, and this was before digital. I've never told anyone that, but that's the truth.

The color, the shape, and the texture--none of it is accidental. Every item we wear has a glorious (or sometimes not so glorious) history, and that history extends back years--centuries, even--before Oscar de la Renta's 2002 collection.