ROCHESTER, Minn. (AP) - Madeline Van Ert, of Rochester, has had quite the year during her reign as Miss Minnesota, with lots of fun memories and experiences.
One of them is the trip she took to Paris last month, at the invitation of Lebanese fashion designer of Haute Couture and ready-to-wear clothing Georges Hobeika, who is the designer of the dress she wore to the Miss America Pageant last fall, the Post-Bulletin (https://bit.ly/2m8nC8a ) reported.
“I took a very unconventional route to Miss America with my choices, style-wise and personality-wise,” she said. “It was really important to stay true to myself and make sure that the things I was choosing were things that I would actually choose, and I wasn’t just picking things for Miss America.
“This designer, Georges Hobeika, is based out of Lebanon and I’ve always really admired his designs,” Van Ert said, “so we had sent a message to one of his PR people asking if they carried any of his dresses in the U.S., so we could look and see about getting one for Miss America. They got so excited and were very enthusiastic and agreed to help sponsor the dress.
“It was a cool connection and super unconventional, which was great, and that enough was super lucky for me that I could wear this super fancy dress at Miss America,” she said, “But in December we got an email from the PR department with an invitation to the Paris Fashion Week show. It was such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, one of those hypothetical bucket-list things. It was never anything I thought I would actually get to go to.”
“I was in awe the whole time and kept feeling like it was a dream the whole time I was there,” Van Ert said. “I’d never been to Paris before this trip, so that in itself was already super exciting. I don’t know the norms of these shows and events, so I showed up and was waiting in a standby line and someone pointed out that I had a VIP card, so I was in the wrong line.
“It kept being one lucky encounter after another,” she said. “And once we got inside, they ended up moving me to the front row, which if you watch ’Sex and the City,’ is a pretty big deal!”
The outfits Van Ert wore in Paris were all hers. I personally thought she looked like she could have been one of the models, so I was surprised to find out those were all her clothes.
“They were my clothes, but I bought them for that trip,” she said. “My personal stylist (my mom) and I went shopping for all of those outfits. It was funny, though, because it was a fun jumpsuit and a couple people from the press asked to take my picture, so then I had to pretend that I really belonged there and that I knew how to pose.”
The dresses and clothes on the runway were so beautiful and intricate, Van Ert said, it was an overwhelming experience, but it didn’t stop there!
“I ended up getting to meet with Georges for a meet-and-greet after the show,” she said. “It was fun to chat with him about wearing his dress for Miss America, and then (this was the part that she got tossed into reality) when we were going to have our picture taken, the photographer told me that my lips were chapped, and told me to put chapstick on and come back for the picture. That photographer knew I was an impostor!
“He took our picture for some French fashion magazine. I don’t know what it was, but my lips are very moisturized in that photo, wherever it ended up.”
The dress from Hobeika’s line that she wore in the pageant is part of his ready-to-wear line but was custom fit to Van Ert.
“It was hard to narrow down because all of these dresses are amazing,” she said. “I picked one and then sent them my measurements. All of my measurements, they needed everything, from my pinky to my wrist and my thumb to my wrist and my wrist to my elbow, and my wrist to my shoulder - they probably could have built another me with all these measurements, but they custom made the dress to my body so it came and fit perfectly.”
Van Ert wore that dress to the Ivey Awards (kind of like the Minnesota Tony’s, celebrating Minnesota’s professional theater) and has a few more events throughout her reign that she will be able to wear it at. Her reign ends on June 17, when she gives the crown away to the next Miss Minnesota.
“Some of the highlights (of the year) obviously were Miss America and this Paris trip, and I really love all of the service work, but it’s hard to pick one thing over another because each appearance is so different,” she said. “One thing that was really cool, and surprisingly difficult for me, was when I was asked to speak to all of the speech classes at Mayo High School. I graduated from Mayo (in December 2013) and I have had to do a lot of nerve-wracking things, like speaking in front of legislators at a brunch or speaking at at 5K walk for sick children and their families, but going to talk to a bunch of high-schoolers was the scariest thing I’ve had to do this year. My siblings go there and a lot of those kids know my family, so if I did something embarrassing, it would get back to me.”
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Information from: Post-Bulletin, https://www.postbulletin.com
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