To design the bold gymnastics leotards Team USA will wear at the Paris Olympics this summer, GK looked to centuries of French design.
Each of the nine custom pieces, released today, is inspired by elements of both French and American culture, and has an intricate meaning woven into its stretchy, crystal-encrusted fabric.
“We purposefully went into this knowing we had the unique opportunity to tie the host city into the inspiration. Paris is the fashion capital of the world, so we really wanted to play into that while still holding true to the fact that these athletes are unmistakably representing Team USA,” GK design director Jeanne Diaz tells Harper’s Bazaar.
Diaz adds that she and her team referenced contemporary Parisian fashion, historical couture, the art nouveau movement, and architecture. They also played into Paris’s standing as the City of Light by adding on the shimmer via thousands of brilliant Swarovski crystals—more than they’ve ever used before.
“Every Olympic cycle, we try to see how many more crystals we can pack on, and not even necessarily the quantity, but just the placement of them in a way that gains the most sparkle,” Diaz says.
The brand began using crystals in 1996 (for Ukraine’s Lilia Podkopayeva), “before the machinery really existed to translate the designers’ crystal designs into an actual heat transfer, so all of those were placed by hand,” Diaz says. Once technology…
