From Dusk — Designing a Birthday Cake for Harris Reed at The Standard Ibiza
- Tammy Lin
- May 26
- 4 min read
What it means to design for someone whose world you already love?
When The Standard Ibiza first reached out about a birthday cake for a private client, I didn’t know who the client was. I submitted an initial quote, answered a few questions about scale and format — and moved on to other work.
Then I found out it was Harris Reed.
I’ll be honest: I went straight to his Instagram, his website, his interviews, his runway archives. I watched videos of his collections. I read the piece he wrote for The New York Times about maximalism. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I understood why this commission felt different.
Harris Reed doesn’t design clothes. He builds worlds: ones that exist entirely on their own terms, with their own logic, their own excess, their own tenderness.
As someone who identifies as queer, I recognise something in that instinct: the freedom of creating a space that wasn’t there before, not as a rebellion, but simply because it needed to exist. His work resonates with me not just aesthetically, but in that deeper sense of knowing what it means to construct something unapologetically, from the inside out.
If I could, I would design an entire series of cakes for his world. This was only the beginning.
The event was Harris Reed’s 30th birthday dinner at UP, The Standard Ibiza — an intimate gathering of close friends and collaborators on the hotel’s rooftop overlooking Dalt Vila.
The creative direction was immediately clear — deep shades of burgundy and crimson, candlelight, a distinctly gothic and theatrical edge. The atmosphere Harris Reed wanted was already coherent and fully formed. My job was simply to translate it into something edible.
Translating Harris Reed’s Visual Language
His pieces are enormous, theatrical, fully committed to their own excess. And yet there is always something in them that feels playful, almost amused by its own drama. The silhouettes are impossible. The proportions are wrong in exactly the right way. You look at his work and feel both the weight of occasion and the pleasure of someone who knows, and enjoys, that they are performing it.
He wrote in The New York Times that maximalism, for him, is about revealing more, allowing more of yourself to be seen. That idea stayed with me throughout the entire design process.
I didn’t want to simply borrow his visual signatures.
I wanted to ask: what does this feeling translate to in cake?
Ceremonial, but with something looser underneath?
The answer, for me, came through movement. The cake needed to look, from a distance, like it had dressed for the occasion — and then, on closer inspection, like it had loosened its collar halfway through.
For the flowers, instead of the refined botanical style common in luxury cakes, I chose dark Calla Lilies — a flower Harris himself has used repeatedly in his bridal work — sculpted in deep aubergine and near-black tones. Alongside them, I added fine feathering made from edible wafer paper, referencing the plumage that appears throughout his collections. The combination was deliberate: the flowers brought elegance, the feathers brought something rawer, more theatrical.
The buttercream texture on the cake itself was designed to echo the movement of heavy draped fabric — organic, flowing waves.
From a distance, the cake reads as formal. Up close, it feels alive.
The Constraints No One Sees
What makes cake design genuinely difficult and interesting is that it exists within a set of constraints that have nothing to do with aesthetics.
Before a single design decision is made, there are questions that have nothing to do with how a cake looks: Where will it be? What is the temperature? How far does it travel? When does it appear, and under what light? Is it a surprise? Is it meant to be cut immediately, or to sit and be seen first? Who is in the room, and what does the moment need to feel like?
These are the questions a cake designer carries long before picking up a piping bag.
The visual language — the colours, the textures, the decorative elements — can only be finalised once these realities are understood.
A cake that photographs beautifully in a studio may not survive an outdoor summer evening. A design that works at intimate scale may dissolve into the background at a large event. Structure, climate, timing, and transport are as much a part of the design process as anything else.
The most skilled part of this work, I think, is making all of that invisible. When a cake arrives and holds its presence in the room — when it reads exactly as intended, at exactly the right moment — nobody sees the decisions that made it possible. They only see the result.
That invisibility is the craft.
The Big Day
When the photographs from L’Officiel Ibiza appeared, I found myself understanding the evening more fully than I had while I was in it. The care that Harris’s team had put into every detail, the way everyone present seemed to be speaking the same creative language — it all became visible in the images.
The cake was surrounded by the work of Aurea floral studio, dark hydrangeas, deep red roses, sculptural anthuriums — created the world the cake lived in. Seeing the two together in the photographs made sense of something I couldn’t fully articulate on the night itself.
In Ibiza, that kind of collaboration feels natural. It is a place that attracts people who create freely, and that freedom shows in the work.
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