How this teenager landed a Met Gala dress design gig

“I had to move my furniture to lie down the fabric to cut the circle skirt,” Ekimian said, punctuating the sentence with a booming, easy laugh that peppers all her statements. “You don’t have to be anywhere special to make something you’re proud of.”

The gown — sleek and full length, made from black and blue brocade with rope details, a drop waist and an elaborate neckline — is not for just anyone, but then again, not just anyone is invited to the Met Ball.

It was custom-made for Sandra Jarva Weiss, the wife of Daniel Weiss, president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it nods to this year’s theme: “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination.”

The pattern reminded Jarva Weiss of leaded glass, similar to stained glass but without color, and the roping hints at details on priests’ robes. The neckline also subtly evokes a cross.

At Jarva Weiss’ final fitting, two weeks before the event, the gown was draped on a paisley armchair where Ekimian knits and had for weeks watched two mourning doves incubate their eggs in a nest on her windowsill. They hatched the week she constructed the final garment. The scene conjures a fairy tale, but Ekimian is no princess waiting patiently for life to happen. She is always on her grind.

“Unstoppable,” “passionate,” “self-reliant” and “talented” are all words Jarva Weiss, a lawyer for a midtown firm, used to describe Ekimian in just a matter of minutes. “She has a very infectious spirit,” said Jarva Weiss, who asked Ekimian earlier this year to create her dress.

Ekimian, a Russian-American who was born in Washington, D.C., and spent many years in Egypt, a self-described “hugger,” exudes none of the pretension or anxiety one might expect from a 19-year-old thrust into the big leagues, though designing this dress is not her first higher-profile project.

Ekimian, a wrestler who won the 2015 women’s wrestling state championship with the Maryland National Team, recently designed women’s singlets for Adidas Wrestling.

Like many of her accomplishments, this came to be not because opportunity knocked, but because she created a door where one hadn’t existed.

In 2016, while working at the Reebok store in Union Square, Ekimian met with higher-ups for Adidas Wrestling and explained to them why women’s singlets needed an update. “A lot of people don’t realize that women wrestlers’ thighs are so much larger in proportion to the rest of their body,” she said.

She told them she could design a new fit. And she did.

Aside from attending Parsons (she is a sophomore) and creating sportswear for an international brand, Ekimian baby-sits, cooks in homes and caters parties. She also volunteers for the nonprofit Beat the Streets, which helps disadvantaged youth through wrestling.

There is no “too much,” she said, calling her packed schedule “an adrenaline rush.”

It’s the cooking that brought Ekimian and the Weisses together for the Met Gala gown. In early 2017, she was contacted through Care.com, a site that connects families and caregivers, by a woman needing someone to help make meals. That woman was Daniel Weiss’ mother, Leah. “I make a mean lasagna,” Ekimian recalled telling her.

From there, Jarva Weiss asked Ekimian to hem some drapes. “They were for 18 windows, 32 panels,” Jarva Weiss said. “Katya had them back to me in three days.” A close friendship quickly followed.

If you haven’t met Ekimian, it would be easy to think her life story was a yarn spun of exaggerations, but if anything, she seems to downplay her accomplishments, occasionally sprinkling in some self-deprecation. “I dress like early 2000s Mark Zuckerberg — all hoodies and Adidas slides,” she said, joking, but not.

At Parsons, Ekimian tends to tailor her projects toward athletic wear, but Jarva Weiss’ Met Gala gown is not her first foray into formal wear.

In high school, at the Cairo American College, Ekimian made prom dresses for herself and her friends — nine dresses her freshman year and seven her sophomore year, including her own. “I just kept saying yes,” she said.

For Ekimian, designing for the Met Gala is a full-circle moment. Growing up, she would follow the event online every year with her mother, Elizabeth Arrott, who is a journalist. Before Jarva Weiss’ gown, Ekimian’s senior prom dress was the favorite garment she had made. It was inspired by the Met Gala’s 2015 theme, “China: Through the Looking Glass.” “It was a floor-length silk brocade red and gold dragon-printed dress,” she said.

Egypt was the perfect place to learn to sew, said Ekimian, who is self-taught. “Fabric was so inexpensive, and there was so much, I just started busting stuff out.”

And no material was off limits.

She once made a dress out of Dum Dums lollipop wrappers that she had collected in a classroom. When she needed more to finish, she called the Dum Dums factory. “Can you send me discarded wrappers?” she asked. They shipped her the ends of spools for free. “It’s so easy to call someone,” she said.

On May 7, her dress will make its red carpet debut at one of the most scrutinized fashion events in the world.

When asked how much luck has played in her success, Ekimian paused before mentioning a version of a quotation by Louis Pasteur that’s a favorite of her grandfather: “Chance favors the prepared mind.”

“Yeah, I always try to have a prepared mind,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.