Karen Chen helped the U.S. secure the silver in team figure skating this week with a beautiful free state performance, but it wasn't just her triple lutz, triple loops or layback spins that brought beauty to the ice.
Chen wore a stunning, heavily detailed, lilac costume for her routine, and now she’s revealed the designer behind it — her own mother.
In a video shared on Team USA’s official Twitter account, the 22-year-old explained how mom Hsiu-Hui Tseng made the piece that suited her free skate so well, as well as how she helped.
“She probably does 90 percent of the work,” Chen explained in the clip. “I do 10 percent, and by 10 percent, I just tell her, ‘Oh, that looks good,’ or ‘That doesn’t look good.’”
But the difficult details, which include hand-placed beads, rhinestones, sequins and appliques, are all down to mom.
“She does all the hard work, and she puts in blood, sweat and tears into it,” Chen said.
And it shows.
“I think my favorite part is probably how this butterfly down here, she strategically put the stones and arranged them in a way so that it looks like a butterfly,” she noted as she pointed out a collection of rhinestones on the front of her costume. “Because, in my free program, I’m skating to ‘Butterfly Lovers Concerto,’ and I just want to be a pretty butterfly on the ice.”
Thanks to Tseng’s design, and her own moves, she achieved that goal.
Last year, in an Instagram post that celebrated Tseng on Mother’s Day, Chen shared something else her mother gave her.
“Happy mother’s day to the v talented mom who gave me my mad one foot gliding skillz!” the now-silver medalist wrote.