Fashion statement
Israel’s culture minister dismissed criticism about the dress she wore to the opening of the Cannes Film Festival.
The bottom of the dress’s skirt is a picture of Jerusalem that wraps around the wearer’s body.
“It was lovely to see how much affection the dress received at Cannes,” Miri Regev, a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s rightist Likud party, told Ynet in an interview about the dress.
Regev was in Cannes to represent Israel at the event, which had an Israeli pavilion.
On social media, users manipulated the image and reposted it with various images superimposed on the Jerusalem one, including the security barrier, which Israel built to keep out terrorists, running along some of Jerusalem’s municipal borders.
The upper part of the dress was sewn from gilded mesh, trimmed with gems, crystals, and hammered copper strips, in a possible allusion to the song “Jerusalem of Gold.”
The designer was Aviad Arik Herman, an Israeli based in Sweden, who said he had worked on the dress for six months at Regev’s request and with his mother’s help. Herman told Army Radio that Regev rented the dress from him; she paid him approximately $2,000 for designing it and another $600 in rental costs. The rental costs came from her own pocket, he added; he did not say if she paid for the design costs herself.
JTA Wire Service
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