rama duwaji wore a cascading upcycled Knicks T-shirt dress by Miss Claire Sullivan at the New York Knicks championship parade and City Hall ceremony on Saturday morning.
Miss Claire Sullivan said she began draping T-shirts on her own body on Friday morning to make the dress and that friends helped gather shirts from street vendors; "When I saw how many colors there were, I was inspired to get one in every color and turn them into a dress."
Miss Claire Sullivan on Vogue
Miss Claire Sullivan said, "My entire family is from New York, but have all since moved away, and everyone was texting me about wanting Knicks shirts." She added, "I wasn’t able to go to any of the street vendors myself, so my friends helped me source." Sullivan described starting the build the day before the parade and, later, that she likes the improvised process: "I love to make a look just for fun and see what happens. I feel like that’s when I do my best work,"—remarks she made to Vogue about designing Rama Duwaji’s dress.
New York Knicks Championship Parade
The New York Knicks won their first NBA championship in 53 years in a 4-1 series win, and a ticker-tape parade was held in New York City on Saturday morning that began near Bowling Green in Lower Manhattan and ended with a Key to the City ceremony on City Hall Plaza. Zohran Mamdani announced the parade on social media over the weekend; he joined the ceremony with his wife, Rama Duwaji, as the city marked the title.
City Hall Plaza Key Ceremony
Zohran Mamdani joined the City Hall ceremony with his wife, Rama Duwaji, where she layered the upcycled Knicks T-shirt dress over a black skirt and finished the outfit with orange pom-pom earrings. The dress’s cascading look was achieved by arranging multiple Knicks T-shirt panels in overlapping tiers—Sullivan’s Friday-morning draping supplied the layout, friends’ sourcing supplied multiple colors, and the panels were set to fall over a base skirt so the shirts read as layered, upcycled fabric rather than single garments.
Rama Duwaji’s appearance thus combined visible craft and civic spectacle: a custom piece built from street-vendor–style Knicks T-shirts presented at a rare championship celebration. No additional public engagements were announced beyond the parade and the City Hall ceremony, and the choice to wear bootleg-merchant–sourced shirts introduced a public contradiction between high-fashion presentation and street-market provenance.
Rama Duwaji’s parade look closed the public celebration, but one outstanding item remains: what happened to the unfinished reference to a vintage B for the mayor’s private midnight swearing-in?
