I took the MTA ferry up and down the East River several times, chasing a single frame of the Empire State Building.

I waited for the right hour. The right light. The right weather.

I needed an uninterrupted view so the silhouette could breathe.

Eventually, I captured it exactly as I had imagined it.

The Empire State Building is one of my favorite buildings in the city. To me, it is not just a landmark. It is old New York, the New York that shaped the skyline and stamped the city’s identity onto the world.

From the river, the building rises like a deity emerging from Manhattan’s grit and grind. From that eastern angle, nothing stands behind it. The sky becomes a blank field. The negative space sharpens its form.

I wanted to wear it.

I designed Empeiria, a dress that carries its elegance and magnetism. I wanted my body to become the sky around it. Illusion tulle turned my skin into atmosphere. Black crepe carved the silhouette of the tower across my chest, its verticality climbing over my left breast, directly above my heart.

There were structural challenges.

Working closely with Estelle, we engineered the silhouette so the base of the spire could anchor to the tulle while still standing tall, projecting upward as the dress moved with the body.

Rather than attempting to sculpt the spire from fabric, Sarah proposed something radical: an embellishment that would function as the dress’s crown. The spire was constructed from a weave of twistable nails and wire, echoing the building’s own steel and aluminum peak. What emerged was not decoration, but declaration. Architecture translated into couture. Industry into intimacy.

During the embodiment shoot, I listened to “(In My) Solitude,” written by Duke Ellington and immortalized by Billie Holiday. The song set the emotional register.

The building reflected my loneliness, the ache of loving a city while still yearning to feel loved by it, to feel that I belonged in return.

Solitude in a city of nine million.

Singularity in a jungle of towers.

The Empire State feels alone, not because it is isolated, but because it is distinct. Even surrounded by newer glass giants, few rival its proportions, its restraint, its Art Deco dignity. By day it stands composed. By night it dresses itself in choreographed light, pulsing in synchronized color, still commanding attention nearly a century later.

But its glory was not uninterrupted.

Completed in 1931 during the Great Depression, it struggled with low occupancy and was mockingly nicknamed the “Empty State Building.” It later lost its title as the world’s tallest when the original World Trade Center towers were completed in the 1970s. After their destruction in 2001, it reclaimed symbolic prominence, only to yield height once more when One World Trade Center was completed in 2014.

Its rise and fall mirror our own cycles.

There are moments when we stand at the top of our skyline, and moments when we feel emptied out. What remains is not dominance, but identity.

Empeiria honors that endurance.