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.

It's kind of hard when your moniker is "bridal" and "evening" for people to understand that I don't run around in a bridal gown all day, nor do I run around in an evening gown. I run around in clothes that resonate for me. I wanted to do those clothes in my ready-to-wear collection - because I don't know how you can be a woman designing for other women and not relate it back to yourself.

I see myself as an arbiter of taste.

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.

I started at the very highest level so the upper end is something I know very well. I know it instinctively. But all the years I was designing, it frustrated me that I could reach so few women.

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.

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.