American ice dancer Madison Hubbell will compete for a medal next week in a costume designed specifically for her — by her own mother.
Hubbell’s mother Susan went to college for fashion design, and the ice dancer has insisted that her mother handle her costumes since she started in the sport at age five.
“There are people who make really amazing costumes, and as you can imagine they’re very expensive, so it’s not really rare for moms to make costumes for little girls starting out,” Madison Hubbell said, via NBC and the AP. “Yeah, at a certain level it becomes more competitive, but luckily my mom went to college for fashion design and she’s been sewing since she was young, so really, she is a professional.”
Susan Hubbell admits there’s a lot of pressure in getting the outfit right, but she’s proud to design and create what her daughter wears.
“Oh my God, the criticism is ridiculous,” Susan Hubbell said. “I will say that we’ve done some incredible costumes, I feel like, and we’ve done some that if I looked back I might change in some way. But if I look at the overall realm of figure skating and what people put out there sometimes, on a whole — the world, global level — I think you’d look at Madison and say she’s in the top percentile.”
There are moments where outfits change at the last moment — including a costume with $1,000 worth of rhinestones on it that was discarded after being worn once.
“It was incredible. The thing was solid, tiny little rhinestones,” Susan Hubbell said. “But it happens all the time, I’ll make a costume and they’ll change their mind, or they want to go with a different feel, and all it does is hangs in the closet. Nobody ever sees it again.”
There is no shortage of parents who are heavily involved in the lives of their athlete children, but this is a pretty neat twist. The American ice dancing team of Hubbell and partner Zachary Donohue face a difficult battle to get on the podium, but it would be a neat story if they can pull it off in light of this.
