Zac Posen and a Team of Bangladeshi Farmers Made Iman’s Dream Gown for CARE’s Impact Awards 

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Iman in custom Zac Posen, made from silks cultivated and hand-dyed by the Living Blue collective in Bangladesh. Makeup by Keita Moore.Photo: Hunter Abrams

The legendary model, actor, and philanthropist Iman Abdulmajid and designer Zac Posen have a long history together: Zac once babysat for her daughter, Lexi Jones, and he even made one of his rare bespoke menswear pieces—a snap jacket—for her late husband, David Bowie. “My husband thought the world of him,” says Iman. “David always thought, ‘Oh, he’s so ahead of his years.’” Zac recalls: “Both of them were very kind with me, when I was really young and new and going to events and terrified.”

At the beginning of the year, Iman became the first global advocate for CARE, the international social injustice and poverty-fighting organization founded in 1945 in the aftermath of World War II. At its inception, such high-profile celebrities of the day like Joan Crawford and Bob Hope were enlisted to bring attention to the care packages being sent to famine-fueled and war-torn Europe. Today, Iman believes in “story-telling.” “When you hear somebody else’s story, regardless of where they are from,” she says, “you can identify with it. I’ve worked for a lot of charities, especially when it comes to [helping] girls and women.”

Adds the Somali-born Iman, “I found that as a refugee myself at one time, those are the people who fall through the cracks. One of the things about CARE, is that I have had the privilege of asking a lot of Americans through the years to help me raise funds for challenges that were not in America. And there is a lot of poverty in this country. I just came from L.A. and I went to Venice, and you would not believe the homeless situation there. It’s like a third-world country. There is airborne disease, there are no facilities, no baths and toilets and all that. And so one of the things that CARE promised me was that we would do as much here, and so that was one of the reasons I came on board.”

Photo: Hunter Abrams

Iman was delighted to discover that “by the gods,” her old friend Zac Posen was co-chairing CARE’s Impact Awards Gala tonight, and she reached out to ask if he would create a dress for her to wear. “When I want to make an impact,” says Iman, “I go to Zac. In America we don’t have that many ‘couturiers.’ And for me, it’s him.” In 2011, for instance, Iman was an honorary chair for the Opening Night Gala Benefit of the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, and Zac made her a custom gown that Vogue’s Andre Leon Talley described as “a fantastic frigate of a dress.” “To be able to use whatever talents or awareness I have to help people around the world in need has always been important to me,” adds Zac. “I’ve worked closely with different charities throughout the course of my adulthood.”

In the course of researching CARE’s global programs, Iman had discovered Living Blue, an artisan farmers’ collective in the impoverished country of Bangladesh. The project “took my breath away,” she recalls. Living Blue is reviving the tradition of sustainable organic indigo dying that first flourished when the country was a British colonial outpost. The current initiative enables women in the region to finally become their families’ breadwinners, and Iman sought assurances that this practice would be ongoing. “Over 200 women now work at this,” notes Zac. “Because of their work, they’re now able to feed their families three times a day.”

“It’s in a community that never hired these women before and now had made them integrated in their work,” adds Iman. “My intention is that I find them $350,000 in funds so that in two years they can be hiring 15,000 farmers and artisans and ultimately sustain 75,000 people. They’ll be able to help their kids go to school and help the whole community. I don’t want them to stay as a charitable partner,” she says. “I want them to be independent. What they’re creating is really valuable and it’s beautiful. It is where the future of ‘sustainable’ really is—and they’re doing it from the bottom, all the way up. So this little dress is the genesis of that—that journey of a dress from this community that I’m trying to help.”

Photo: Hunter Abrams

Iman met two of the farmers involved in the initiative and subsequently reached out to see if they would be able to create significant lengths of their hand-dyed silks to craft a gown for her to wear to the gala. She and Zac were enthralled by the samples that arrived from Bangladesh; they decided on the intense blue produced from the indigo plant (Living Blue produces natural dyes across a whole spectrum of color, including red dyes made with pomegranates, and has recently began experimenting with traditional Japanese shibori techniques). Despite concerns that the vast fabric quantities required for Zac’s elaborate vision would arrive in time—“they farm it, they dry it in the sun; it’s all sustainable, and then it has to come from Bangladesh!”—it duly appeared. “They got it together,” says Iman. “I was so proud of them.”

Zac could realize the gown that he had envisaged whilst draping the toile at his family’s farm compound in bucolic Bucks County, surrounded by cornfields and inspired by the vision of the pond seen from the porch. “It was an amazing thing to drape and create in nature,” Zac explains. “You’re actually seeing moving light, and natural light adds a whole other dimension.” The translucency of one of the two fabric weights that Zac selected inspired a dramatic cape. “When I saw the fabric it was so incredibly fine and beautiful,” he recalls. “Light penetrates a natural dye—it kind of bounces back. It has luminescence to it. It’s a living material instead of a scientific reaction. Really luxurious fabric that is fully sustainable, non-GMO, is something I’ve been very interested in and researching for a long time—because actually taking care of our planet is the ultimate luxury. I’m figuring out what’s really important to me at the moment,” adds Zac, who has recently experienced some vicissitudes with the company that bears his name. “Definitely something I’ve been thinking about quite a great deal is how we as creators, we don’t ever lose the imagination, but the materials can be evolved.”

When Zac sent Iman some images of the magnificent work in progress, “I lost it!” she recalls, “because I thought, how beautiful—really spectacular—and what great representation it would be for these artisans.”

“This was for a friend and for an amazing cause,” says Zac. “I wasn’t expecting to go right into draping a piece in this moment, but when a good friend calls about something important, that was inspiring and meaningful. It was a really calming experience. And I mean, I’m dressing a goddess—just with love!”

Photo: Hunter Abrams