DAZZLE ’EM!
How a crafty club kid started making crystalstudded statement pieces for the glitterati
ALL it took for Kyle Farmery to go from fashion-school dropout to New York’s bling king was 7,000 rhinestones, eight hours and an Instagram post.
That’s basically how the bedazzled Patrón bottle he designed for Lizzo came to be. In August, the “Juice” singer famously drank from it onstage at the MTV Video Music Awards, which drew nearly 2 million viewers — and turned Farmery into a sparkle sensation.
“The bottle changed my life,” Farmery, a 24-year-old androgynous model and NYC club fixture, tells The Post.
“Lizzo’s stylist put out a call on social media asking if someone knew how to work with E6000 glue,” Farmery says. He’s a whiz with the stuff — it’s a crafting glue that’s perfect for rhine stoning — so he reached out to the stylist on Instagram. “At 11 p.m. we connected, and I did [the bottle] overnight. All the rhinestone stores were closed so I had to reach out to a friend I had just bought some crystals for and take them back!”
A few weeks after the viral VMA performance, Patrón reached out and ordered 150 more rhinestoned bottles. He charged the company $650 a bottle. “You do the math,” he says. Not a bad first six months in business. Since then, Farmery has been working 12-hour days in his Clinton Hill studio. He started his company, Sparkyle Studio, a month before the VMAs, and has since bedazzled three pieces for Lizzo’s tour (a gold tequila bottle, blinged-out Jeffrey Campbell boots and a red crystal bodysuit). He rhinestoned a Veuve Clicquot bottle with black crystals that’s currently in Diane von Furstenberg’s holiday window downtown, as well as
an astronaut helmet for Suki Waterhouse and a scooter for Debi Mazar. Bergdorf Goodman bought out his entire first collection and even put some of his designs in a holiday window. One piece in the collection, a rhinestoned devil’s mask, sold for $1,950.
Farmery, who grew up in Tribeca, first met his mentor and best friend, nightlife fixture Amanda Lepore, after his mom took him to one of her calendar signings when he was 12.
“Amanda does her own crystalling and makes her own looks and she taught me everything I know,” Farmery says of the famous transgender performance artist and model, whose body was referred to by filmmaker Joel Schumacher as a “moving sculpture.”
“After high school, I’d go to her house to work on pieces.”
He began going to clubs in his early teens and would spend all day creating a head-to-toe look for the evening. His style — a mix of drag and performance art inspired by Thierry Mugler and Bob Mackie — caught the attention of notable photographers such as Ellen von Unwerth, Inez & Vinoodh and Steven Klein. After graduating from high school, he attended fashion school in London.
“That didn’t work out so great for me,” he says. So he moved back to NYC and landed internships at Zac Posen and with stylist and Italian Vogue Editorat-Large Patti Wilson. Farmery says that was where he got his “real college education.”
Although he thought he’d be designing shoes or working in fashion in some way, Farmery says he never thought that his passion for rhine-stoning could be its own business.
Despite creating elaborate outfits and glam hair and makeup looks to wear to the clubs — one red jumpsuit in his studio has more than 150,000 glued stones — Farmery says that, depending on the client, he works with all kinds of materials and brands from Swarovski to Party City. “I go to sample sales or look on eBay and buy the worst pairs of Manolos or Louboutins,” Farmery says. “Scuffed up, ripped, falling apart, destroyed, you name it. Then I paint and rhinestone them. I buy plastic masks from Party City or a $10 mesh bodysuit on Amazon.”
“Rhinestones are timeless,” Farmery says. “Think of Liberace and Elton John. Rhinestones never go out of style.”