It takes tremendous will to compete in any athletic endeavor, so it meant going to bed early and getting my homework done in advance. I had to sacrifice things, like a social life, to be a skater at 15. But I loved skating so much that it was worth everything to me.

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.

Ready-to-wear is what I've wanted to do since the beginning. ... I'm not a girl who spends my life in a ballgown

I see myself as an arbiter of taste.

I work with structure, but I go outside the box and give it my own spin. I adore the challenge of creating truly modern clothes - where a woman's personality and sense of style are realized.

Whether you are a skater or a dancer, without sounding narcissistic, it is all about looking in the mirror. Where I used to practice in New York City, there was a mirror so you could actually watch yourself skate. And nowadays my golf teacher will film me swinging so I can see what I am doing. Having looked first at myself and my own body for so long as one does as a dancer and a skater, it was so natural to do fashion.

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.