When fashion and architecture meet: designer Kristin Brady at Metropolitan Fashion Week

At the end of September, the annual Metropolitan Fashion Week took place in LA, celebrating its 10th anniversary. Like every year, the gala focused on fashion and costume design, showing creations of the participants in front of LA’s eye-catching city hall building – a particularly fitting backdrop, as this year’s motto for the costume competition was ‘world architecture’.

Among the participants of the competition was Kristin Brady, who showed a design referencing the Tower C building in the Chinese city Shenzen. Brady took inspiration not only from the tower itself, but just as much from Zaha Hadid, the British-Iraqi architect, designer and artist responsible for the design of the towers. Hadid, who is recognised as a major figure in the late 20th and early 21th century of global architecture, typically made use of soft lines and shapes in her designs – a visual approach that Brady relates to.

Before deciding on the Tower C building as a blueprint for her dress design, Brady studied the works of Zaha Hadid. Having her mind set to challenging herself, she inspected not only the tower itself, but just as much the city they were built in. In her process, she came across another cue that influenced her vision for the design: the lights of the city.

Thinking like an architect

Brady broke down the design process of the dress into five pillars. Just like an architect decides on the materials used in a building, she began sourcing fabrics, eventually finding the perfect fit for what she had in mind at Prime Fabric – a fabric store in LA’s downtown fashion district with innovative materials, where many local designers find unusual and unique fabrics.

During the entire design process, Brady followed the idea of creating a building, not a dress – which took her out of her comfort zone as a designer. She had to come up with creative solutions and strategically think about how to include the LED lights which would represent the windows of the towers. The lights could be switched on and off by a device hidden in the pockets of the dress. In combination with the shimmery purple, brown and golden colours of the fabric, the construction represented the appearance of the building in the nocturnal hours of the city. The arched lines of the dress mirrored Hadid’s preference for curved shapes once more, enhanced by the soft blur of the organza fabric. “I grew in so many ways through this challenge to actually think like an architect by designing a fashion piece”, reflected Brady a few days after the show.

To complete the design in a realistic way, Brady designed a whole cityscope for the bottom of the dress as well as a hat design including a rooftop and a pool that arose from her own imagination. The dress was presented by her friend, a model known under the drag name Shanita Blunt.