In the past, Syracuse University design students collaborated on the dress Boeheim wore to the Basket Ball, an annual gala held for 24 years to benefit the Jim and Juli Boeheim Foundation. For the past four years, SU students have worked on the gowns Boeheim has worn to the event. This year, for the 25th and likely final Basket Ball, a compromise was struck. Mayer, the SU professor of fashion design and coordinator of the fashion design program, would draw the initial sketches and physically make the dress. He would reprise his role from the second Basket Ball as Boeheim’s dressmaker. But this time, his students would assist in the project, from the initial phase of picking a design, to choosing the fabric, to details as minute as how a beaded overlay would appear on the bodice.
Mayer said he designed the dress as something of an homage to Jacqueline Kennedy’s days in the White House, when she wore “high neck dresses with the bell shapes.” Boeheim appeared for a fitting Tuesday morning at The Warehouse, the downtown Syracuse home of SU’s School of Design of the College of Visual and Performing Arts. There, on the seventh floor, in an atmosphere redolent of Project Runway, Boeheim tried on the unfinished dress. And while Mayer gathered and pinned material, students stood nearby to watch and offer suggestions.
For the last three years, Mayer had chosen an advanced student in his class to conceptualize and work on the gown under his supervision. But this year, he and Boeheim wanted to involve all students in the project. “They don’t work really with a client. They’re working with concepts as any designer would,” Mayer said. “You create your own muse and then you come up with this inspiration for it. But (it helps) having that fit model or that actual client and then an actual event.”
Boeheim said she has enjoyed the process. On Tuesday morning, she invited suggestions about accessories and details about how the dress might finally look. “The students have been incredible and I’m just so honored to be a part of this,” she said to Mayer. “And this year to have your hands on it and your design and their stamp of approval just means the world to me.”
The Basket Ball takes place Saturday (April 27) at the Turning Stone Resort and Casino.
