Fashion Touchdown: This Haute Couture Helmet (with 4,000 Hand-Glued Crystals) Can Be Yours

Courtesy
Courtesy

Football just got a lot more glam. To celebrate this year's Super Bowl, Bloomingdale's has teamed up with the CFDA to create a range of haute couture helmets, all of which will be auctioned off to benefit the NFL Foundation. In addition to the amazing cause-the NFL Foundation works to improve the health and safety of youth sports-we're also obsessed with the creative toppers from the CFDA's participating designers, with Alice + Olivia's blinged-out version ranking at the top of our fantasy league. That's why we just had to get all the details from designer Stacy Bendet on how the piece came together! "The inspiration came from a shoe we were doing for spring-we were working on the shoe and helmet at the same time, so I thought, what if we put crystals all over the helmet, too?" she told InStyle.com.

Also of note: The text at the top reading "I don't have a dirty mind, I have a sexy imagination," was intended as a tongue-in-cheek nod to the football players' humor. "It's actually something I wrote on a chair in one of our stores, and I thought it was funny to include on the helmet and take it into that world. It's glam and girly, but the saying gives it a football player touch."

Between laser-cutting the acrylic letters and having a team of staffers and interns hand-glue each of the 4,000 crystals, the helmet took around a week to construct, and in that time, Bendet found a few parallels in fashion and football-despite that the later is more her husband's game. "Just like there are teams in football, we work together as a team in fashion," she added. "That's something we always talk about here. Everyone is part of a team as we're designing, and you can bring that feel into things." Visit bloomingdales.com/superbowlhelmets to score one for yourself.

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