When Lady Gaga stepped onto the Super Bowl LX stage last month to perform a surprise salsa rendition of “Die With a Smile” alongside Bad Bunny, the world was mesmerized by her dress.
The tiered, sky-blue flamenco gown wasn’t just a fashion statement—it was a love letter to Puerto Rican heritage, drenched in a specific shade of azul celeste to match the island’s 1895 independence flag.
But while the dress was designed by Brooklyn-based icon Raul Lopez of LUAR, its most intricate secret lies hidden on the fourth floor of a nondescript building at 327 West 36th Street.
The “blue tornado” on 36th Street
For George Kalajian, the owner of Tom’s Sons Intl. Pleating, the Gaga dress arrived like a “tornado.”
A designer rushed into his Garment District workshop with a bolt of fabric and a desperate deadline: it had to be finished by the end of the day.
“They whisked it away to whoever was going to sew the dress; I had no idea who it was for,” George recalls.
It wasn’t until he saw the finished masterpiece moving fluidly under the stadium lights that he realized his team had provided the structural soul of a global pop culture moment. For George, it was a “huge validation” of a craft his family has protected for over 150 years.
Five generations of secrets
Tom’s Sons is the last standing pleating specialist in a neighborhood that once housed dozens.
George is a fifth-generation master, continuing a trade that began with his great-grandfather’s textile mill in the 1870s.
The shop is a maze of heavy machinery and thousands of custom paper patterns. The techniques are so specialized that George’s own father wasn’t allowed to watch his grandmother, Rosa, work as a child—the “family folds” were guarded like state secrets.
Today, George and a cousin in Lebanon are the only two people on earth still practicing this specific lineage of the art.
More than just Gaga’s dress
While Gaga’s “Something Blue” moment is the latest headline, the workshop is a quiet giant in the industry:
- The Met Gala: They provided the heavenly pleats for Ariana Grande’s 2018 Vera Wang gown.
- The Big Screen: Their work has appeared in everything from The Gilded Age to Wicked.
- The Textbook: George literally wrote the book on the craft—Pleating: Fundamentals for Fashion Design—to ensure these skills don’t vanish.
📍 327 W 36th St. #400, New York, NY
👗 Catch their mesmerizing process videos on Instagram at @internationalpleating
