Vera Wang

I fell at Nationals in 1968. . . . It is a lot of pressure when thirty or forty thousand people are going “Oooh” together and you’re sitting on the ice. It’s the same with fashion. I’ve had a show that I thought represented a great effort, and a certain reviewer killed it. . . . It’s not unlike sports where one is subjectively judged! . . . It’s the ups anddowns of it. You have to be passionate to stay in it. If you don’t love it, why put yourself through it?

Vera Wang is a fashion designer. She launched her eponymous label in 1990. She served as design director of women’s accessories for Ralph Lauren, and spent sixteen years at Vogue, where she became the magazine’s youngest editor. She was born in New York City and graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a degree in art history.

The Power of Reinvention

When I was seven, my father, Cheng Ching Wang, who first learned to skate when he lived in China, bought me a pair of ice skates for Christmas. He took me skating that first time at the Seventy-second Street boat pond off Fifth Avenue in Central Park. I still remember where we sat. He strapped on my skates and took me out on the ice. It was just a pond that was frozen over, but it felt magical, sort of like flying. You could feel the wind in your face; there was a kind of freedom.

I started taking lessons and fell in love with it. Eventually, I found the right coaches and wound my way around the skating world. It was always my mother, Florence, who really pushed me. She was at the rink with me every day. It was a huge, huge sacrifice. She had Hodgkin’s disease, a blood cancer, but my father never told her or me because he thought that would discourage her. She got cancer when she was in her thirties, but survived to be eighty-nine. I think my skating career is what kept her alive for a very long time because there was a reason for her to get up in the morning. My father used to joke when she’d say things like, “Oh, we landed a double axel,” or “We skated perfectly.” Of course it was only me skating, but she would refer to it as “we.” That’s how much it meant to her, and how much it meant to me, that we did it together. It was a level of intimacy, love, caring, and sacrifice that I’ll never forget and that I’m trying to impart to my kids.

Skating is a beautiful and empowering sport. The sad thing is your parents have to give up a lot. They have to try to be able to fund it. You train insane hours on and off the ice and rink time is so expensive. Figure skaters, unlike hockey clinics, get the earliest hours of ice time. I skated at six or seven o’clock in the morning and then we went to school, after which I went back to the rink and skated again until eight o’clock at night. And three days a week I danced, from five thirty to seven in the evening, at the Balanchine School of American Ballet, which taught me grace, extension, and tremendous core control. I then came home and did homework. It was pretty grueling. In the summer I went to skating camp. By noon I’d already skated seven hours. Then I had lunch, rested, and went back and skated some more. We used to train sometimes up to twelve hours a day. It was intense.

Some days if I didn’t want to skate at four in the morning, my mother would say, “You don’t have to get up. You’re not skating for me.” And then, of course, I’d leap out of bed. Through skating my parents instilled in me a sense of discipline, responsibility, wisdom, and good sportsmanship. They stressed all along that it was about the journey. Even though I may not have won Worlds or Olympic gold, it was about what skating taught me every day in every way. They also believed in the dignity of accomplishment and how important it was for one’s sense of self. Dignity was very important because my parents came from China and had to start a whole new life here in the United States. Even if my level of competition wasn’t at the level of Venus Williams, I did get the daily sense of discipline, which was ingrained into me in a way that, at sixty, I still possess and that will still be with me every single day of my life. MORE