The glittering, undulating Costume Designers Guild Awards statuette, originally minted by the jeweler Bvlgari, has become a coveted and celebrated symbol in its own right. When asked about his inspiration, David LeVey says he was influenced by the gilded Hollywood films of the forties and fifties. LeVey sought to marry the aesthetics of the 19th-century sculptor Canova to the surrealism of Dali by way of Technicolor and to use his lifelong fascination with billowing fabric. He wanted to capture the feeling of the moment from “Broadway Melody” the Gene Kelly-Cyd Charisse dance sequence from Singin’ in the Rain.

“The statuette is meant to evoke two things above all,” explains LeVey, “that a costume designer’s work both reveals and conceals the mystery of a character, and that costume design is an art of volume and movement, of light and shadow, as well as color, texture, and silhouette.

I suppose the image of amorphous fabric floating down and resolving into the human form suggested costume design to me as an act of creation as much as of appropriation

To represent us in a single sculptural image, therefore, something timelessly classical yet fantastical and mysterious; the ethereal and the earthy conjoined. I really—we all really—wanted it to have a striking presence.”