This is snow impressive!
A Manhattan wedding dress designer went viral this week for sculpting an uncannily realistic mannequin out of snow.
Upper West Sider Colette Komm headed to Central Park Tuesday afternoon with only two serrated bread knives — and in just three hours, had carved out the snowy work of art.
“I had like a cheering section. There were people applauding. It was great,” Komm told The Post of the labor of love she dubbed “Snowmannequin,” which racked up close to 8 million views on Instagram and TikTok.
“People were really grateful that I had made this piece of art that brought joy to the city.”
Komm, who grew up in Vancouver, explained that before she could even start working, she has to amass a massive pile of snow with her bare hands.
“If you build a snowman the day after it snows, it’s really easy to roll a giant ball. But after the snow has gone through a freeze-thaw cycle, you cannot roll a ball of snow,” she said.
“So I literally had to just pick up chunks with my hand, put it in a pile, and as the pile got bigger, I literally had to hug the pile to compress all the snow together.”
The next morning she went back to her masterpiece — which stands at the south side of Terrace Drive, just west of Bethesda Fountain, through the West 72nd St. entrance — to painstakingly carve out the hem of the dress.
When she arrived, she realized someone had messed with her frozen creation of a dress form, which doesn’t have a head or arms, but just a neck.
“Someone had put a giant snowball on the neck, to look like a really weird-shaped head,” she said.
‘So I took it off because this is a dress form, it doesn’t have a head.’”
By that time, Snowmannequin had already become a viral sensation, so she had at least 50 people come by to witness it for themselves.
“One woman came up to me and she’s like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been wandering around in the park since 96th Street trying to find this,’” she recalled.
“There was one group of people that converged, and each one of them had seen it on a different [social media] platform.”
She also set up her phone’s camera to film, and 750 people watched her carving the hem on her TikTok Live stream.
At one point, a cop car pulled up and a police officer walked over. Komm, who used a 12-inch and a 9-inch knife for the project, thought she may be getting in trouble.
“I’m like, ‘Oh no, it’s a cop and I’m sitting here with these giant knives,’” she recalled.
“But he was like, ‘I just have to see this.’”
Read the full article here
