Vera Wang, apparently. She designed the fantastic all-black costumes that Evan Lysacek work in his gold-medal-winning routines last week. (Last season, his costume designer was the late Alexander McQueen.) The short program costume featured a high collar, black feathers at the cuffs, black gloves, irregularly criss-crossed strips of black sequines, and, I don’t know, some kind of garden-edging black stuff around the tops of the sleeves. “Hello, Hamlet!” I said when I saw him. And then there was his long program costume. It was bold, simple. A high-necked black leotard. Oh, and Swarovski crystal-encrusted snakes winding around his shoulders and torso. They weren’t exactly “customary suits of solemn black”!
Frankly, I thought they were awesome. They put Lysacek’s physique and impeccable form right on display. In a sport that is often campily over-the-top, compared to other costumes, Lysacek’s were restrained and dramatic. I mean, check out the costume of sore-silver-medalist Yevgeny Plushenko, he of the “he’s not manly enough because he has no quad” charge against Lysacek. He wore a black leotard bedazzled with red and white crystals in the long program and a black leotard with a deep-V neckline spangled with elaborate patterns in white crystals in the short program. Johnny Weir, he of the famed flamboyance and Edward Scissorhands pallor, wore black with pink corset lacing.
Weir doesn’t let the black go when he’s off the ice, though. Here is in his street clothes, with noted Mountie Stephen Colbert.
I would totally wear that.
I always forget that Vera Wang started out as a figure skater until I read that she’s designed so and so’s costume.