Woman painstakingly recreates Kamala Harris' rainbow Pride jacket using 35,000 rhinestones

Emma Lauren Fasulo had always loved “sparkly things.” So shortly after President Joe Biden announced Kamala Harris as his pick for vice president, Fasulo knew exactly the DIY project she wanted to take on: recreating by hand the eye-catching rainbow rhinestone-studded jacket Harris wore to the San Francisco Pride parade in 2019.

But this wasn’t only an artistic endeavor. Fasulo’s husband Jonathan had been diagnosed with cancer in May 2020, and he was about to start chemotherapy. Fasulo saw the project as a way to keep her mind occupied during a stressful time.

“His doctors had told us that he needed to do two rounds of chemo, and we were both pretty anxious about what that was going to entail,” Fasulo tells Yahoo Life. “So around that time I had been looking for something to do while I was caring for him through this anticipated chemo. With all of the news buzzing about Kamala, I came across pictures of her wearing the rainbow bedazzled jacket at San Francisco pride in 2019. It just lined up. I needed something to keep me busy so I wouldn't be so anxious, I had a lot of time at home, and it seemed like good timing to celebrate who we were hoping — and thank goodness she won! — would be the first female vice president of the United States.”

It took Fasulo 22 weeks to complete the jacket, which is decorated with about 35,000 Swarovski rhinestones placed by hand. She finished the night of Biden and Harris’s inauguration.

Recreating Harris’ rainbow rhinestone jacket is the “biggest, most labor intensive project” Fasulo has ever done. “I've had severe anxiety all my life,” she shares. “A couple of years ago I started to bedazzle things as a way to keep myself busy and my mind focused on something other than the eternal worry that I always carried around.”

At first, Fasulo started covering some items in her house in rhinestones, including a stapler, a Coke can and even a Vicks VapoRub jar. “But they were always small items,” she says. “I moved on to aluminum hand sanitizer bottles this summer and was giving them as gifts. And luckily some people bought some, as well. This jacket was the first time I've ever added rhinestones to clothes, and now I want to add rhinestones to everything I wear!”

But the lengthy project wasn’t without its challenges along the way. “Creating it did have some really hard moments,” says Fasulo. “One of my favorite things about bedazzling is that it's a very repetitive task. You lay the glue where you want and pick up each individual stone and place it where it needs to be. I think the hardest part was just pushing myself to finish. There were certain things that I was envisioning that just were impossible due to things like seams or buttons. I even stopped for a full month while I was on the orange band because I was stressing out over all the things I didn't do right.”

There were times when it was hard for her to not focus on the jacket’s imperfections, pointing out to her husband where she thought she’d “screwed up” the design. But “he would turn to me and say, ‘Em, you're picking things apart that I don't see,’” Fasulo recalls. “‘This looks beautiful and you're picking at every fine detail because you're so close to it. Trust the process. It looks great.’ And hearing that really helped me. I stopped getting stuck on small things and just trusted the process.”

Fasulo says that she’s always been attracted to “sparkly things, ever since I was a child,” adding: “If it caught my attention with color or sparkle, I wanted to wear it. Sometimes things can be so dull or dark in the world. Wearing something bright and shiny can make you feel like a star. In my opinion, every single piece of clothing could be better if you add some sort of glitter, sequin or rhinestones to it.”

Read more from Yahoo Life:

• Feeling relieved? Sleep better? Experts explain impact of Biden's inauguration

• Jill Biden and Kamala Harris support American designers in colorful inauguration looks

• A more contagious strain of COVID is spreading in the U.S. Should you double up on face masks?

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