Collecting Creatives: The Bruin behind viral ball-pit dress worn at the Grammys

The 2017 Grammy Awards marked Ricky Amadour’s big break.

But they weren’t there for music – Amadour designed a rainbow plastic dress that pop singer Girl Crush wore down the red carpet.

Amadour created the now-viral ball-pit dress, which was unlike anything the third-year art and art history student had created before.

I first met Amadour at Untitled, the Broad Art Center coffee shop, unknowingly sitting under one of their own drawings, “Gender Fluidity, Concave, Convex,” created with ink on canvas. The piece features cutouts of paper arranged into twisting and contorting shapes. The pieces were then pasted onto the canvas to create a 3-D effect.

They took me on a tour of the art department’s studio, room 6250. Its walls and pillars were splattered with plaster, and the space smelled strongly of paint. Three of Amadour’s current pieces leaned against each other in a corner of the room.

Ink-covered canvas pieces featured minuscule geometric patterns that flowed into larger designs, like cliffs or waves. Other pieces were brushed with thick black strokes of paint. A recurring theme through all of Amadour’s pieces was a juxtaposition of intricate detail and over-the-top size: One of their canvases was 10 feet by 8 feet.

“If you see the detail from far away, it’s very tiny, but as you get close up, it starts to pop out,” Amadour said.

A majority of Amadour’s artwork was drawn in graphite – a contrast to the technicolor palette of Girl Crush’s Grammy Awards dress.

The piece “Cosmological Anthology 2017″ is hanging in the Broad Art Center’s gallery for the Undergraduate Exhibition. The work features a graphite sketch with references to the Vatican, along with images of statues in the sculpture garden and collages of photographs from social media. The seemingly disconnected inspirations all weave into a 15-foot piece.

“It’s so much bigger than a human being,” Amadour said. “When you look into it, you just get lost in the moment because it’s so much to take in, and yet so calming because of the palette.”

As the dean of the School of Arts and Architecture, David Roussève said he knows Amadour in a professional sense. Amadour is a leader in the arts department and is working on a series of in-progress drawings with professor Lari Pittman, he said.

“In addition to focusing on painting and the craft of art-making here, I appreciate how (they) look at the bigger purpose of art, and the ways it might intersect more globally and broadly,” Roussève said.

Amadour spends much of their time as a studio artist at UCLA, but designing Girl Crush’s dress was a career highlight.

 

Though Girl Crush knew Amadour had never designed a dress before, she felt Amadour had the creative eye she was looking for to make her dream of a ball-pit dress come to life, she said.

 

Amadour met Girl Crush for the first time at a Catholic faith retreat in Malibu in May 2015, and the two instantly clicked, Amadour said.

When Girl Crush was thinking about her creative friends that could help bring her idea to life, she said Amadour was the first person to come to mind, and they began working on the dress in January.

“We would meet every weekend to work on the dress,” Amadour said. “I would sew while we watched movies, and it was really sweet.”

The top of the dress is a bright pink bandeau accented with rhinestones like Ariel’s seashell top from “The Little Mermaid.” The full skirt is covered top to bottom with children’s ball pit balls in a spectrum of colors – pink, blue, green, red and yellow.

She wore three tutus and a full hoop skirt for the final poofy effect, Girl Crush said.

The day of the Grammy Awards was – as Amadour put it – a gnarly day for both Amadour and Girl Crush. Amadour attributed this to all the hard work that was put into the dress in the weeks leading up to the Grammy Awards and to finally seeing the look come together on the red carpet.

Girl Crush remembers eating at the Yard House at L.A. Live prior to the Grammy Awards during the one-hour break between the red carpet and the beginning of the awards show, she said. While she was eating, she saw herself on red carpet coverage on 10 flat screens throughout the restaurant.

Amadour, staying at Girl Crush’s hotel, called their mom and friends about their dress making its debut to the world that night.

“It was like sending your kid off to preschool for the first time,” Amadour said. “I don’t really know what it’s like, but I felt like the parent to this dress, and it’s out there in the world now, and my name is attached to it.”

Roussève said he loved the dress Amadour made for Girl Crush.

“It was beautiful and whimsical – it has a sense of humor, and also I thought it was really cute,” Roussève said. “Art is about taking risks and doing new things, and I thought the dress did all of the above.”

Photos of the dress spread through Glamour magazine’s and the Grammy Awards’ Snapchat accounts, Amadour said.

“Then the LA Times posted it, then The New York Times posted it, then Vogue posted it and then Elle posted it,” Amadour said. “I haven’t experienced that kind of recognition for my work, so I was pretty excited.”

After their first endeavor into fashion with the Grammy Awards, Amadour wants to continue expanding their brand and exploring a career in fashion, they said.

They are currently working on a self-titled spring/summer 2018 fashion collection, which is a mix of Los Angeles and Parisian vibes, Amadour said.

Amadour and I stared at the intricacy of “Cosmological Anthology 2017,” our last stop on their tour of the Broad Art Center.

“I could do this 50 times over, it was so much fun,” they said.