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twitterAt CityCenter, it’s not your usual uniforms for workers
Second looks may be needed to spot employees by what they’re wearing
Leila Navidi
Designer Jhane Barnes looks at a CityCenter uniform. Barnes’ menswear has been sold in Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.
Monday, Nov. 23, 2009 | 2 a.m.
CityCenter Workers Get Uniforms
CityCenter has begun fitting their 12,000 employees into their new uniforms as the December resort openings approach. The 200,000 uniforms are the work of award-winning designers such as Jhane Barnes and some of them are made from recycled materials. For some, the uniform fitting marked the first step out of unemployment.
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At CityCenter’s 25,000-square-foot uniform distribution center on Dean Martin Drive, Jhane Barnes, a slight woman with squarish glasses and short hair, proudly shows off clothing racks heavy with new uniforms.
Barnes is a New York fashion designer who was tapped by MGM Mirage to design about half the uniforms CityCenter employees will wear. The first woman to win the Coty American Fashion Critics’ Award, her men’s fashions are sold in boutiques and department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.
Barnes’ designs for CityCenter’s 8,900 uniformed workers don’t look much like uniforms at all. She favors subtle geometric shapes digitally printed on high-quality cotton, lightweight wool in browns and slate blues, and tightly-woven shirts with decorative, barely-there shapes and swirls.
Achieving that look is why CityCenter bosses chose Barnes, an iconoclast among fashion designers who stands out in part because she creates her own fabrics from scratch.
“I wasn’t supposed to design (traditional) uniforms,” she said. “But I didn’t want it to be like you walk in a place and you’re not sure who’s supposed to wait on you ... I sort of designed in between.”
Barnes’ task seemed straightforward enough. She has created furniture and carpet for several of the architects and designers who created CityCenter. This time she would design clothes to go with the interiors, based on swatches of carpet and artist sketches.
Barnes found inspiration in the Star Wars films, which featured costumes with an outdoorsy, modern look. The eco-chic seemed to fit the vibe that CityCenter, which has received awards for environmentally friendly technology and design, was aiming for.
Instead of creating clothes in the standard range of retail sizes, she would need to craft smaller batches of clothes in more than a dozen sizes, from extra small to 6XL.
“I had to convince all my suppliers, the mills and sewing factories, to make small quantities with a lot of sizes,” she said. “If I didn’t already have a fashion line with them, they probably wouldn’t have done it.”
Like typical uniforms, they would be stress-tested. But they also had to fit just right and be comfortable for regular folks who might gain or lose a few pounds during their tenures. To that end, Barnes hid elastic in some of the clothes, and on some women’s jackets used decorative bungee cords and adjustable straps.
CityCenter would pre-order sizes based on guesswork and previous resort openings. Accustomed to seeing her clothes draped on lanky, pencil-thin models, Barnes would sigh as a jacket bunched over an employee’s ample hip or belly. And yet, a perfected silhouette was possible: Behind the wall where employees try on uniforms in front of long mirrors, a half-dozen sewing machines hum in unison, tailoring pants and jackets for employees who were hired for their skills rather than the shape of their bodies.
Barnes pitched about 400 designs to CityCenter executives, of which 176 were selected to outfit 31 departments with some of the most visible jobs in the resort.
Cocktail server uniforms — high-profile costumes designed to show off the female form to best effect — were assigned to another designer.
Designing sexy outfits for young women, Barnes said, is a specialty onto itself.
Discussion: 14 comments so far…
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Attention City Center employees, save your uniforms, they will be collector's items pretty soon... LOL!
star wars,i want the wookie outfit
Dear City Center cast member,
we are sorry to announce you that you will have to work for free for the first month in order to pay for your uniform.
We do apoligize for this inconvenient,
your beloved president
James Al Malahbar Mohammed Murren
they should wear barrels with suspenders because they are so much in hock.
Shameless rear kissing on the local talk stations...wonder what they are going to get out of it
I won't go there because it is haunted
Well, I guess the diehard naysayers had their first shots. Cmon guys, it looked like you already gave up on City Center and the Vegas economy without giving it a chance. I suggest that we give them a year and then we can all say "we told you so" if they fail.
unclegig
It'll take less than a year.....
City Center will be dwarfed and toped in 10 years. Mark my words.
City Center is a beautiful place where the idle rich can come for gourmet dining, spa treatments, High Limit gaming, and spectacular hotel tower views of all the dirty little people scurrying around like little cockroaches down on the strip.
Seriously? An Article about the design of a workers uniform
The things people focus on in this town!
Keeping track of 200,000 uniforms and 12,000 employees must be a mammoth task! Best of luck to CC,they're going to need it. I wonder how long it takes to pay back $8.5 Billion and still make payroll,utilities, overhead etc?? Wow!
Is the media the PR Firm for this outragously expensive structure? Or just give the public the "good spin" of a story. How long will it take for CC to make a profit? Until then what? What are the fees for parking? Avg cost of dinner will be? Cost of an avg room? But I know they have 200k uniforms.
I think CITY CENTER is a fantastic CONCEPTION and would love to visit.....
The ONLY Building I did not like is the TACKY ORANGE CHECKERBOARD
building ---there is a SIMILAR in WALL Street, NYC and it looks like CANDY over there TOO !!! WHAT KIND OF INTRO DEALS for SENIORS ?????
bldblu
Funny you made fun of the article yet you read it?
I can't wait for it to CC to open, it's an amazing sight!
LOL environprotector !!
They should have a free showing of "The Towering Inferno" on opening day. To you supporters of CC: the Dubai version of CC has already flopped. Check out this report:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/busine...