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 was the girl who nobody thought would ever get married. I was going to be a fashion nun the rest of my life. There are generations of them, those fashion nuns, living, eating, breathing clothes.

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.

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.

My bedroom is my sanctuary. It's like a refuge, and it's where I do a fair amount of designing - at least conceptually, if not literally.

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.

As the mother of two daughters, I have great respect for women. And I don't ever want to lose that.