Kim Kardashian wears Clara Chon's hand-painted jacket to her friend's birthday dinner in Malibu. Photo / BackGrid
An Auckland-based fashion designer and artist has described the "surreal" moment she saw Kim Kardashian wearing one of her creations.
The reality star was photographed at her good friend Jonathan Cheban's birthday party at Nobu in Malibu last night, decked out in a statement-making leather jacket covered in her own selfies.
Sworn to secrecy for months, designer Clara Chon, who works under the label Blue Blank, can now reveal she was behind the jacket.
Chon was approached to create the jacket for Kardashian after a stylist friend used another jacket she had made - adorned with pictures of the rapper Drake - in an editorial photoshoot, which ended up on his mood board.
"I've got friends that are working as stylists for Kimye, and Kanye had liked my jacket that my friend styled on his mood board," she said.
"Then Kim saw it and then I got told that she wanted me to do one of her, with selfies. I had this Baudrillard kind of idea of simulation and simulacra, like a meta selfie jacket."
She had originally been told Kardashian was going to wear the jacket for a photoshoot, so it came as a surprise when she was informed that it would be making its debut sooner than expected.
"I just frantically contacted my web designer and I was waiting and waiting and it was so nerve-wracking.
"It was really surreal, because I know that designers dream about dressing her."
The jacket has been featured on a number of overseas website, but Chon said people had not yet realised she was behind the creation.
She sourced the leather jacket herself while travelling through Europe last year, picking it up in a vintage shop in Belgium. The images were selected from the Kardashian's Instagram and meticulously hand-painted onto the jacket.
The paintings are so realistic that the Daily Mail reported they were printed on.
"I worked it on for a long time, actually a month and a half," she said. "I wasn't meant to talk about it, so it was really hard to keep my mouth shut about it."
Trained as an artist, Chon completed a master's degree at the Elam School of Fine Arts, with a focus on wearable objects.
When one of her works was used by a stylist friend in Sydney for a photoshoot, she started thinking about getting more into fashion.
"I thought, hey I actually really love doing this and I don't care if other people tell me that it's not art," she said.
It seems things are working out. She's currently working on a design for New Zealand choreographer and dancer Parris Goebel and also has an idea for another celebrity-themed creation - a jacket featuring images of Kardashian wearing her jacket.
And that's about as meta as you can get.
- nzherald.co.nz
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