GARMENT DISTRICT — A Garment District craftsman says a couture designer has yet to pay him nearly $3,000 for five custom dress forms he hand made for the company.
Randi Rahm — a Manhattan-based design company that has dressed stars like Beyoncé, Jennifer Lopez and Mariah Carey — hired 56-year-old Rohan Rambaran to craft two custom dress forms for a total of $1,280 including shipping, according to an invoice dated Aug. 25, 2015.
After that, Rambaran made three more dress forms for the company and charged $1,700, another invoice dated March 21, 2016, shows.
“Even though they owed me for [the 2015] work, I still trust[ed] them, and I’m not getting my money,” he told DNAinfo New York.
Rambaran — who runs a business called Andy’s Dress Form out of a small space inside a building on West 35th Street, between Seventh and Eighth avenues — said he’s called and sent emails to the company about the money he's owed on several occasions.
An accountant he spoke with said she would look up the work he had done and get back to him, but never did, Rambaran claimed.
Representatives for Randi Rahm did not immediately respond to request for comment.
The craftsman makes the mannequins out of papier-mâché for customers including Alexander Wang, Vera Wang and Calvin Klein, he said.
He learned the craft in 1979 at the first job he took after moving to the U.S. from Guyana.
“It’s a hard job, [but] this is my knowledge. This is what I know to do,” he said. “That’s why I stuck here for so many years.”
He believes other Garment District workers may have encountered the same issue he’s facing with Randi Rahm.
“If they do that to me, there may be a lot of people over there that they do that [to] too,” he said.
