In the late summer of 2013, Wendy Nichol was two weeks away from staging her first runway show at New York Fashion Week when she got a call from Beyoncé’s stylist, Lysa Cooper.
Beyoncé had spent the past 48 hours trying on 200 dresses for a video for her song “Drunk in Love,” Cooper said.
And they had landed on a sheer black chiffon number Nichols had designed for her upcoming Spring 2014 collection.
“She was like, ‘Jay-Z is standing here telling me this is the only dress he wants her wearing during the entire video,’” Nichol told The Post.
Beyoncé went on to wear the dress as she frolicked in the ocean for the video for what would become one of her most iconic songs.
Nichol had to rush to make a duplicate of the intricate silk-tulle gown for her fashion show.
Now, the one Beyonce wore is on display in Nichol’s first visual art show “Departing the World Once More,” running through Oct. 27 at her studio at the Museum Building on 158 Mercer St.
“It still had some seaweed and holes in it,” Nichol said of when she got the garment back from Cooper.
But she left it as it was. “It definitely has some Beyoncé magic in it.”
While a handful of Nichol’s gowns and accessories — which are beloved by celebs such as Rihanna, Zoë Kravitz, Lindsay Lohan, Claire Danes and Ilana Glazer — are on display at the show, its focus is paintings.
In the past year and a half, Nichol, 52, has moved beyond designing clothing and jewelry to crafting moody portraits of fashion models and stars such as Rihanna and Julia Fox — and using her nearly naked body to put unique “imprints” on canvas.
To make some of the two dozen pieces featured in the show, Nichol stripped down to shorts and a bralette, put on a transcendental meditation playlist, and “imprinted” herself on the work. She used her shoulder to crush fruit seeds, her feet to smear blueberries and her hands to press essential oils onto her canvases.
“I was thinking when I make a dress, I take the fabric and I put it on my body and pin it,” she explained. “I was trying to think, ‘How would I form something in paint in this similar way?’ So my first instinct was that I needed to make physical contact with the canvas.”
She developed this method after she had taken a week-long painting class in Napeague, Long Island, near where she lives when she’s not in her Soho studio.
That morning, she had eaten oatmeal and pomegranate for breakfast and scattered the leftover seeds on a blank 12-by-6-foot canvas on the floor. Then, she said, “I just got on it.”
Afterward, she put the canvas on the wall and started painting around defined areas of pomegranate.
“I kept going, and then I started to see faces,” she recalled.
Nichol gave the gigantic abstract work the title “Missing Witches.”
“I feel that I had somewhat of a psychic download of these sort of past lives of women that have gone before,” she said. “That the witches and sages and teachers and women maybe in my past or the past of our collective consciousness showed up here through this sort of download that I was receiving.”
Nichol — not entirely surprisingly for a jewelry designer who loves amulets and crystals — is really into “psychic downloads” and “frequencies” and “past lives.”
When she paints, she said, she seems able to tap into things that happened long ago, lifetimes ago — into energies and emotions that linger in the air, or reside inside her.
“I’ve been studying past life regression,” she said, adding that she’s always felt deeply connected to “something from the past.”
“I’ve always felt like I had a Native American past life,” she added. “I’ve always been obsessed with Native American culture. I’ve always used horsehair and feather in my work.”
Meanwhile, a painting of Rihanna portrays the “Diamonds” singer in a plume of smoke, while Fox is shown looking as though she may be giving birth in a fairytale forest of tangled trees.
“She has such an alien-like beauty and this force,” Nichol said of the downtown-it girl. “I don’t know her personally, but I know that it is coming up in the future to meet her.”
