THE COUTURIER WHO DRESSES COUNTRIES

There is a particular kind of designer who does not make clothes so much as arguments, and Aviad Arik Herman has been making his in tulle, brocade and roughly fifteen thousand Swarovski crystals at a time for the better part of two decades. He grew up in a small town in southern Israel, the son of a mother, Sari, who sewed, and the grandson of a woman who costumed flamenco dancers in Spain. The family came out of Tangier, with Romanian threads running through it too, which is a useful thing to know about a man whose entire body of work is an inquiry into what a country looks like when you put it on a woman and ask her to walk. He trained in fashion design at the Swedish Art College, an unlikely detour that turned out to be the whole plot. In 2010 he reached the finals of Fresh Fish, Sweden's annual contest for promising designers, with a dress built on the architecture of a ballet tutu. Miss Universe Sweden noticed. He dressed the Swedish delegate in 2011 and has been the organization's official designer since 2013. Since then he has dressed delegates from more than a dozen countries: Israel, Sweden, Austria, Germany, Guam, South Africa, Ireland, Japan, Spain, Britain, Morocco, Romania. The method is not fast. A single national costume takes two to three months to build, and the idea behind it is often a year older than that. For Romania at Miss Universe 2021, he studied the folk overcoat associated with Queen Maria, then rebuilt it in fine brocade with ten thousand Swarovski crystals laid in the colors of the Romanian flag. The piece was valued at over twenty thousand dollars. For Morocco the same year he went to the kaftan, and let the silhouette do the talking. For Miss Israel 2016 he used fifteen thousand crystals and an image of Eve. Two of his costumes have been nominated among the top five in the world. "What usually inspires me to design in that context of Miss Universe is to have an added value to the design, charge it with a meaning, a story, an important message," he told Richard Magazine. He is also, and this matters when you watch his work move, a performing artist of fifteen years standing, a dancer and an actor. It explains the drape. Herman cuts for a woman who has to cross a stage, turn, and be photographed from the third row, and his gowns are engineered for that transit the way a ballet costume is: weight distributed, hem calculated, crystal placed where the light will find it at the exact moment she turns. He has built costumes for the National Dance Company of Spain, the Israeli Ballet, the Royal Swedish Ballet School, Ballet Hispanico, The Washington Ballet, the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company and Mattel's Barbie Live. His most famous garment is also his most argued about. In May 2017, Israel's culture minister Miri Regev arrived at the opening ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival in a white and gold gown with the skyline of Jerusalem circling the lower third of the skirt: the Western Wall, the Tower of David,