Rachel Roy on Fashion Week, Spring 2013, Power of Dressing

Rachel Roy will be the first person to tell you that she’s not the biggest fan of the hustle and bustle surrounding Fashion Week, but she’ll also admit that good things always come out of it — from the pieces she designs to the feedback she receives.

This New York Fashion Week, we had the privilege of following the designer through the final push of her Spring 2013 collection — visiting Roy in her studio the week before her collection’s big debut, and then getting a first glimpse of her Spring 2013 line during her spectacular Fashion Week presentation. Despite the pressure around finalizing details for the presentation, Roy radiates a kind of relaxed warmth — a trait that’s won her fans far beyond the walls of the insider-y fashion world (her level of engagement when it comes to social media certainly doesn’t hurt).

Roy launched her eponymous line in 2005, and has since expanded into shoes, bags, and a more affordable secondary collection, launched in 2009, called Rachel Rachel Roy. When it comes to design, Roy insists she spends equal time on both, a prioritization that stems from her own childhood where she had less money to spend on the kind of clothes she wanted. “When I talk to young girls, I tell them you are a product of what you want to be,” says Roy. “I wanted a life that was much more fabulous than the one I was living as a little girl.”

Here, Rachel Roy dives into the inspirations behind her latest collection, how she came to be a designer, and why getting dressed can be the most powerful thing you do.