I don’t know about you, but Ella Emhoff’s DNC dress sent me into a frenzy. Who made such a stunning look for this all-eyes-on-her moment, I wondered? The off-the-shoulder, drop-waist dress, which features a crochet rosette embellishment at the shoulder, was the perfect cap to her fashion streak over the last few days at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And given her ties to the fashion world, I suspected any number of designers.
However, thanks to my trusty group chat, I learned that the dressmaker in question was not the creative director of a major fashion house, but Joe Ando, or, as my friend group knows him, “that guy from TikTok.”
Ando, who has designed dresses for the likes of Dakota Johnson, Keke Palmer, Millie Bobby Brown, Rachel Zegler, and Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, has garnered over 2.7 million followers on Instagram and 2.9 million followers on TikTok. He’s gone viral several times, often beginning his videos with his catchphrase, “Can I make you a dress?” Ando, who lives in New York and attended FIT, was also recently featured in Vogue Italy, where he told the publication, “For me, creating a dress means mixing my ideas with those of the person who commissions it, and the result is always personal and special.”
The lead-up to Emhoff’s dress reveal began earlier this week over on Ando’s social media feeds, where he had followers guessing the recipient of his latest creation. On August 19, he teased that he had a project in the works that “you’ll see on national TV in three days.” The following day, he shared a video in which he held up fabric samples for Emhoff, whose back was to the camera. “Picking out fabrics for a historic dress,” he wrote over the video. In the comments, fans mistook Emhoff for celebrities like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and King Princess, though a handful accurately guessed it was Emhoff.
