Paris, je t'aime!

We have wonderful news!  Austin Bright Light Design had a piece walking a Paris runway for Fashion Week, September 29th, 2019!  While we were at home in Texas for the event, we could not be more excited for our customer, Odalys Marino from Nory's Design Boutique, as she took her collection to France for what is sure to be a wonderful showing.  

In May we received an email from Odalys' husband asking if we would be interested in creating a one of a kind piece for the catwalk in Paris.  Of course, we said yes!  This order was going to be special, as the ask was to include a custom printed cloak with artwork from Aja Trier of the Eiffel Tower instead of our holographic sequins on the outer shell. 

Additionally, Odalys had one more request.  Could we make the Eiffel Tower light up?  Um, challenge accepted!

The Journey Begins

Having a piece custom made is not an easy task, and this was no exception.  So, we began to marshal our resources.  Through our contacts at White Star Manufacturing, we were able to find Shan Shaefer of Stitched Fabric out of Houston to do our fabric printing. 

Working with Shan was amazing!  He was understanding of our challenge and timeline, and helped us work through some issues that we encountered.  Namely, our original photo imagery was okay if you were putting a picture on a website, but not high resolution enough to be blown up by four yards square.  With a little work with our client, then a direct line to the artist, Aja Trier, we were able to secure a picture that was worthy of our task.

Shan then proceeded to give us samples of different fabrics with the art printed on it to see how it would look in various sheens, two and four way stretches and overall aesthetics.  Here's a look behind the scenes at various options of polyester, for example:

Ultimately, we had to go with the "flash" in option 1 above!  It's just ABLD's style, you know?  One problem we noticed was that the broken glass holographic print was making the text we added unreadable from a distance.  So with a quick consult with our client, we decided to change that to cherry red and off we went!

With some graphics help from our main man, Evan Bozarth of Airshp, to get the text looking great and pulling the stars of the night sky in the painting up into the hood pieces, we were ready to print.  Because of the size of the final print needed, Shan had to use his special roto-press machine.  The results were spectacular! 

C'est Fini

We loved how the cloak flowed from a design perspective from the outer shell up through the hood.  The text now "popped" off of the bridge at the bottom and in certain angles the Eiffel was already shimmering in the sunlight.  Excited to take the next step in transforming this into truly an ABLD original, we went ahead and started adding our LEDs to the outer fur trim, as well as carefully constructing the new fairy light LEDs that we sourced specifically for this build into the tower itself.

One of the secrets to this build was to make the fairy lights accessible to the client, while at the same time hiding the guts from the viewer.  This was accomplished by our seamstress, Nga Keith of Bluebonnet Cut & Sew, by crafting a zippered entrance to the tower through the inner shell layer along the cloak wearer's spine.  Through some wizardry we were able to attach the fairy lights along the back of the Eiffel, run the power through our TalentCell battery to make both strands light up, and VIOLA!

To see video of the cloak in action, please check out our Austin Bright Light Design Facebook page!  Special thanks to Jamey Simmons Photography for these shots.

We are so pleased with the results, and hope to see the reactions of the fashion world this week as they catch their first glimpse of our design!  A huge thank you to everyone involved in making this a reality!