When U.S. figure skaters Amber Glenn, Alisa Liu and Isabeau Levitt take to the ice to compete in the Milan-Cortina Winter Olympics, they’re all wearing dresses designed by the same woman.
The designer’s name is Lisa McKinnon, and she dressed all three women competing on Team USA in the singles figure skating competition, as well as two American ice dancers and two Korean skaters for this year’s Olympics. The seven athletes will compete wearing at least 13 costumes from Lisa McKinnon Designs, the Los Angeles-based studio McKinnon founded in 2014.
McKinnon told CNBC Make It that she works 40 to 60 hours a week, regardless of the season. She estimates that by 2025, she and her five employees will have handcrafted nearly 700 costumes for skaters of all disciplines and levels. She says the business charges $90 an hour, and custom costumes for high-level skaters typically cost $4,000 to $8,000 each. (Mr. McKinnon declined to reveal the business’s total annual revenue.)
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She says most clients must request costumes at least six months in advance, regardless of the final product they want, and McKinnon’s team often works on costumes right up to the deadline. Schedules are determined primarily by demand, with time budgeted to accommodate costume emergencies and special requests.
One such special request came in December when reigning world champion Liu asked McKinnon to design a new dress for the Lady Gaga-themed program at the 2026 U.S. Figure Skating Championships in early January. According to the designer, McKinnon completed the dress in a St. Louis hotel room on the day Liu competed.
“I really value every project that I do. Some blood, sweat and tears are pretty normal for me,[although]I don’t cry as much[recently],” McKinnon, 47, says.
skating is in my blood
Born and raised in Sweden, McKinnon grew up as a figure skater and made her first competitive costume at the age of 15. She didn’t have the crystals that are usually glued onto skate dresses, so she hand-stitched the sequins, which means they were secured to the fabric with tiny beads.
She started making costumes for other skaters later that year, she says, after receiving requests from members of the Swedish national team. But mostly, she says, she pursued her own skating career, eventually appearing on professional shows like Disney on Ice for eight years, then working on those shows as a performance director for another eight years.
McKinnon began spending summers in the United States between shows in 2006, and after leaving skating, she took a job overseeing costume departments in Las Vegas and then Los Angeles. In 2013, while she was working as a costume director at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in Beverly Hills, Calif., an old friend who was a skating coach at a local rink asked her if she could design costumes for students.
The dress was so eye-catching that other local parents and athletes started coming to McKinnon, she said. She said she quit her job at the end of 2014 to launch her business and has since built a reputation for creating costumes that add storytelling to the theme of individual skate routines.
Within a year, some of the country’s top stars living in or near Los Angeles, home to several high-level skating coaches, were wearing her costumes to competitions. One of Los Angeles-based early clients, Ashley Wagner, was already a multiple-time national champion when she started working with McKinnon. Another, Karen Chen, went on to compete in multiple Olympics and won a gold medal in the team event at the 2022 Winter Olympics.
McKinnon vividly remembers the first time she saw her design on national television, she says. At the 2017 U.S. Figure Skating Championships, Wagner and Chen wore the design on the podium after winning silver and gold.
“I drank a lot of champagne, and definitely cried,” McKinnon says.
Her business is small compared to the demand. To maintain that, McKinnon arrives early in the morning to handle paperwork and often stays late to clean up, she says, by tossing scraps of fabric or reassembling crystals. Both competitive skating and costume design require determination, resilience and ambition, she added.
“I’m very competitive. I want to do what I’m best at and I want to be the best,” McKinnon said, adding, “Once you skate, it’s always a part of your life in some way. It stays with you. I feel like it’s always a part of my life, it’s in my blood.”
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