The spring shows, we made them in the fall, so the shows were when the fair was on in Dallas. One night I was at the fair and I was looking at those cheesy airbrushed t-shirts, so I made friends with one of the airbrush guys and we had all the girls’ names done and gave them to them. They wore them in the show and then just wore them home. Nadja Auermann, Claudia [Schiffer], Stephanie Seymour, we worked with so many beautiful girls, we were always so grateful they did our shows.
For looks like the one on Carla [Bruni, look 68], I had everything done on white and then hand-painted those stripes on the back of the fabric, then the dyes ran up between the beads and tinted them. That shirt on Debbie Deitering was this incredibly intricate yarn-dyed chenille woven, and it’s transparent, so there were bands of chenille and then mesh. It’s shorts and a t-shirt, it’s just like a normal thing, but not a normal thing. That’s the magic trick. Designers tend to be pretty sophisticated folk. We don’t get recognized for that part because I think fashion can be so silly and vapid, and we can sound like clowns when we’re yacking about it too, but what it does to people is very real.
All of the dotted looks were called Dotti von Furstenberg, because they were very clearly in homage to Diane. This was when Diane was not designing, she was having a coffee break, so it was really fun to pay homage to her through reconsidering her wrap dresses here. I love her. Then there’s that dress on Tyra [Banks, look 59] from when we started working with sublimation printing. I loved it because I could do photographic stuff. I have a massive collection of cake decorating books, I love them, this was a homage to all the insane cakes.
These [19-27] are my executive looks, you know, we were trying to help women dress for success [laughs]. We found this manufacturer that used to make sequin tube tops in the ’70s and had them make these little skirts in wool. The shirt on Veronica [Webb, look 18] is where we just fucked with every proportion. The shirt was so shrunken and so tiny, and I bought a boy’s blazer and started altering. I just pulled the waistband up, stapled the sleeves, moved the shoulder lines in and just played with it to make it really misshapen, and it looked so cute. We kind of totally annihilated every normal proportion, but it ended up coming back together.
These Swarovski crystal skirts [on Amber Valletta and Shalom Harlow, looks 91 and 92]... the skirts were mesh and the crystals were prong-set onto the mesh, so they were a little transparent but also completely pavé with stones. [Ed’s note: The look on Harlow inspired Zendaya’s look for the 2022 Oscars]. I always see when people tag me in the videos of Shalom passing Amber, the memes are so good. The funny part is that those two are still delightful friends, they love each other, so it’s funny that they appear as if they’re rivals.
This was a fun show. I didn’t have a really good time on all of them, but this was one of them that was super fun. Every season we wanted to get a new tool kit and throw a curveball, because no one would expect us to do this stuff. You have to honor expectations to some degree, but it was really important to me to try to subvert them whenever possible.
