The list of designer collaborators for New York City Ballet’s annual Fall Fashion Gala reads like the ultimate fashion Rolodex. Carolina Herrera, Raf Simons, Dries Van Noten, Virgil Abloh, and Sarah Burton are just a few of the 30 names who have designed costumes for the annual celebration of dance and fashion over the past 12 years and whose work is celebrated in a new Rizzoli monograph titled New York City Ballet: Choreography & Couture.
This month, as part of the company’s yearlong 75th anniversary celebration, current Carolina Herrera creative director Wes Gordon has lent his hand to the company’s costume shop for a special edition of the fall gala to celebrate NYCB’s co-founding choreographers George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins, fashion, and New York City.
“I love dance and I love New York.” — Wes Gordon
“I love dance and I love New York,” says Gordon. “I’m so proud to be a New Yorker and to show during New York Fashion Week. New York City Ballet is such a crucial part of our cultural community, so to be a part of its anniversary celebration is really an honor.”
Balletomane and fashionista Sarah Jessica Parker, a vice chair of the NYCB Board of Directors, premiered the Fall Fashion Gala in 2012 with an evening dedicated to Valentino Garavani. But the relationship between dance and fashion at NYCB goes much further back: Balenchine’s daily walks past the Van Cleef & Arpels window displays on Fifth Avenue famously inspired one his most iconic works, Jewels, a 1967 ballet in three acts featuring dancers dressed as emeralds, rubies, and diamonds.
For the gala performance on October 5, Gordon designed new costumes for another of Balanchine’s beloved ballets, Who Cares?, a 1970 work in which George Gershwin standards like “I Got Rhythm” and “Embraceable You” serve as the basis for syncopated group dances and balmy, romantic duets.
Past editions of the Fall Fashion Gala have featured new commissions from up-and-coming choreographers, and NYCB’s director of costumes Marc Happel pretty much gave designers working on those shows carte blanche. Some of their designs were pretty unconventional, like Zac Posen’s tutus cantilevered at surprising angles, Christopher John Rogers’s voluminous neon forms, or Palomo Spain designer Alejandro Gómez Palomo’s deconstructed tailoring covered in 800,000 Swarovski crystals.
The gala performance of an excerpt Who Cares? marks the first time the company asked a designer to redesign the costumes for an existing Balanchine masterpiece and with that came certain parameters from the trust that oversees the legendary choreographer’s creative legacy. Karinska, the Oscar-winning costume designer who led NYCB’s costume shop from 1964-1977, created the work’s original designs.
Her ballet bodices with layered short skirts worn by the female principal dancers, were given a refresh by Tony Award-winning production and costume designer Santo Loquasto in 2013. “It was about adhering to the original colors, silhouettes, and shapes, but with a modern twist,” says Gordon of his design process.
Happel’s assessment: “The costumes very much have Wes’s stamp of elegant simplicity, with really beautiful details.” Gordon has extended the classic Who Cares? silhouette in a dance dress largely made from stretch poly crepe in dreamy shades of blue, pale, peachy pink, and a darker fuchsia. His designs feature a longer skirt with opaque panels that open to reveal godets of pleated tulle when the dancer spins. They also feature delicate sequin and paillette embroidery by Finesse, an Indian embroidery atelier that Carolina Herrera herself introduced Happel to when she collaborated with NYCB on the 2014 gala.
“I’m always hoping that all these speeding trains will end up at the station at the same time.” — Marc Happel
Creating such intricate costumes is, itself, an impressive feat of stagecraft. “It’s all happening in different places: The pleating is done here in New York, the embroidery is happening in Mumbai, and then the actual dresses are being cut out and constructed here in our costume shop,” says Happel. “I’m always hoping that all these speeding trains will end up at the station at the same time.”
