🎙️This week on the Back Row podcast, I chat with Lila Delilah (not her real name), the Madison Avenue Spy. Madison Avenue Spy was one of the first sites to get the word out about luxury sample sales like The Row’s, which have become wild online spectacles. Part one, in which we discuss how brands really feel about her coverage (spoiler alert: not so great!), is available for free. Part two, in which we discuss the Saks bankruptcy and I share a theory about Jeff Bezos at couture, is reserved exclusively for Back Row Premium subscribers. Listen/watch on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube

If you’ve been watching the Olympic figure skating at the Milan games, perhaps you, like me, have thought, This looks like one big project for Jonathan Anderson. (With his abundance of free time.)

The sport is glamorous, fabulous, and awe-inspiring. I’m ready to be a card-carrying member of the Quad God Squad myself. He may not have won gold in the men’s competition, but I give him gold in all things. 

So, where is Big Fashion when it comes to dressing these athletes? Why hasn’t an impressions-hungry LVMH gazed upon the ice — and the quadruple axels practiced on top of it by inhuman beings — and decided to sink its claws into this sport with formalized endorsements and pay-for-play glittery outfits the way they do with so many red carpets? 

Because, simply put, creating these looks is really damn hard. Making skating costumes is a highly technical and specialized skill: They must be lighter than a fleece sweatshirt and feel like practically nothing to the athletes, but look like dazzling formalwear to the audience. If you’ve ever felt the weight of a fully beaded gown, you can imagine how challenging it would be to get that all that sparkle without the weight. (Recall that Camilla Cabello said that her 2024 Met Gala dress, made with 250,000 Swarovski crystals, weighed 15 pounds — nobody’s doing a quad in that.) 

Sure, many high fashion designers create looks for Beyoncé’s performances, and she also needs clothes that stretch, but designing for the ice introduces a whole other element of danger. Like, say, a skate catches a thread and beads spill everywhere.

Which makes it a challenging assignment even for the world’s best ready-to-wear designers. “The performance piece of the whole thing is probably what the fashion houses don’t want to deal with,” said Jackie Wong, founder of figure skating analysis outlet Rocker Skating and a management consultant at McKinsey, on a call from Milan. 

Wong estimated that up to 80 percent of Olympics figure skating costumes are designed by just three people: Satomi Ito, Lisa McKinnon, and Matthieu Caron. Each look costs between $2,000 and $10,000, but some can be more expensive. Skaters typically wear these looks for a full year. “It has to be stretchy, it has to be light,” he adds. “When you’re skating with a costume, the last thing you want to feel like is you’re skating with a costume.” 

Costumes also represent a big chunk of the $50,000 to $100,000 elite skaters invest in their sport each year, so they need pieces that not only werk but truly work. The Games are also an important opportunity for them to attract sponsorships, since these athletes aren’t able to earn the seven figures they could pull in in the ’90s (which Wong called “the Golden Age of figure skating”). So the pressure to deliver is on in more ways than one.

I reached Ito, who created the Olympic looks for our fair Quad God, over email in Tokyo and she answered my questions using a translation tool. She wrote that skaters give her information on their music and choreography, and some send reference images while others specify colors.

“The music information is very important, but I find the choreography video even more crucial for developing the design,” she wrote. She usually spends two to three months on each costume, which she makes almost entirely by hand, from creating the patterns to fittings, dyeing, and decoration. “Figure skating costumes are made from stretchy materials, so the sewing machines used differ from those for regular clothing,” she added. “Above all, ease of movement is the top priority. When using non-stretch lace or motifs, I cut them into small pieces and sew them onto the costume while it's on the torso, using stretch thread. For some costumes, the decorations alone take 70 hours, though this is quite rare.”

This year, one major fashion house — Oscar de la Renta — did decide to take on the specialized work of outfitting a skater, Canadian Deanna Stellato-Dudek. She reached out to top designers after the International Olympic Committee passed a rule in 2024 that athletes could partner with such brands in exchange for a logo presence. Earlier this month, Stellato-Dudek told the Toronto Star the de la Renta team was resistant at first: “They told me it’s not good for the integrity of the designer.” Ultimately, executives agreed to move forward, figuring the exposure would be good for the brand. 

The two costumes for Stellato-Dudek cost Oscar de la Renta $50,000, according to a source at the brand, where Monse designers Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim are wrapping up their work as creative directors. That figure includes creating multiple versions of the looks and travel for fittings. (A viral video going around Instagram claims incorrectly that one dress costs $100,000.) 

It was a challenging design project. Each look had to weigh less than a pound. The team didn’t want to use stick-on crystals for the dresses — one in shimmery metallic and one in red with an asymmetrical neckline — because they’re “tacky” but were fearful of beading in case a thread ripped and embellishments fell onto the ice. The extra work and investment may have been worth the gamble for the de la Renta brand: Stellato-Dudek is sure to attract a lot of coverage given her journey to Milan. She took 16 years off from the sport, only to come back as a pairs skater, win the world championship in 2024, and at 42 now competes in the Olympics as one of the oldest in her sport. She even missed the team event owing to a head injury during training but made it to the pairs competition in Milan. 

Only a handful of top fashion designers have ever outfitted Olympic skaters. Vera Wang dressed Nancy Kerrigan in 1994, and Roberto Cavalli later created looks for Carolina Kostner. Stellato-Dudek’s ODLR costumes have been “a big deal in the skating community” at the Milan Games, Wong said, but not in the sense that her fellow athletes are hoping for high-fashion icewear for themselves.

“A lot of these skaters have costume designers that they trust,” he said, “and the last thing you want is a fashion designer who doesn’t know how to design a costume and for it to be something that impedes their performance — rather than helps their performance.”