A Cleopatra Look Is Never Just a Crown: How I Build a Queen From the Details

This spring, I was sitting on holiday in Sardinia when a customer sent me a photograph of her dress. It was beautiful, but it was not what most people would immediately imagine when they hear the word Cleopatra. There was no turquoise blue, no emerald green, no obvious colour palette we have learned to associate with ancient-Egypt-inspired fashion. Instead, the dress moved through warm brown, soft rose gold and metallic tones, and she wanted me to create a Cleopatra headpiece around it. Rose gold and brown. I remember looking at the photograph and thinking about it for a moment. And then my designer brain started doing what it always does. What exact shade should the metal be? Which stones would disappear into the dress and which ones would bring it to life? Should the pearls be warm or cool? How much drama could the crown carry before it started competing with everything underneath it? Where should the eye go first when she entered the room?

Eventually, I created an enormous three-cobra Cleopatra headpiece for her, finished in rose gold and coordinated with stones and pearls chosen around the colours of her dress. And it looked incredible. Completely different from the Cleopatra I would probably have designed if someone had simply told me, “Create a new Cleopatra.” That is what stayed with me. The customer had shown me a Cleopatra I might never have imagined in exactly that way on my own. After years of designing this collection, this still happens to me all the time. A woman sends me a dress, a colour combination, a photograph, sometimes even an idea she cannot quite explain yet, and suddenly the world I thought I knew becomes a little bigger. And perhaps that is the real story of my Cleopatra Collection. I may be the designer behind it. But I did not create this world alone.

The Cleopatra Collection That Was Never Supposed to Become a Collection

There is one woman I have to mention whenever I tell this story properly: Khloé Kardashian. I have said this before, but I don’t think she will ever know how much one decision she made changed my life. In 2020, Khloé chose one of my crowns for her Cleopatra Halloween transformation. Today I can write that sentence relatively calmly. At the time, it felt completely surreal. She was already one of the most recognisable women in the world, and somewhere in the Czech Republic there was me, building my little brand with my own hands and watching one of my pieces become part of her Halloween look. For her, it may have been one beautiful crown for one extraordinary evening. For me, it became one of those strange little moments that quietly change the direction of your life.

I hope that one day I will have the opportunity to tell her that. I know she has probably influenced more lives than she could ever possibly know, and perhaps she would not even remember that particular crown among everything she has worn. But I remember. And I always will. Because without knowing it, she planted a seed that would eventually grow into one of the largest and most personal worlds inside Carbickova Crowns. The following year, I looked at that transformation and thought something wonderfully uncomplicated: I want to be Cleopatra too. So I created my own.

I made myself a gold headpiece with a cobra rising over the forehead, green iridescent stones and a matching pectoral necklace. There was no enormous business strategy behind it. No spreadsheet telling me that Cleopatra should become a major product category. I simply wanted to create the most beautiful version of Cleopatra I could imagine for myself and wear her for Halloween. And then women started asking for their own. One wanted another colour. Someone wanted different stones. A custom request led me to create a version with white pearls. Another woman wanted black. Others wanted different greens, different proportions, larger crowns, smaller tiaras. Someone wanted more cobras. Someone wanted something less dramatic. Someone wanted matching jewellery. So I kept saying yes. And the collection kept growing.

What began with one Cleopatra I made for myself slowly became tiaras, crowns, halo crowns, single-cobra headpieces, enormous serpent pieces, three-cobra designs, pectorals in different sizes, earrings, necklaces, upper-arm cuffs, wrist cuffs, belts, harnesses, finger claws and pieces I probably would never have thought to create if a customer had not first asked me a question. Today the Cleopatra Collection contains more than a hundred designs and variations. Sometimes even I have to stop and think about how that happened. But the number itself isn’t what makes me proud. What I love is that the history of this collection is really a history of conversations between me and women all over the world. Could you make this in white? Could you match this to my dress? What if the cobra were bigger? Could we add something here? I know this sounds crazy, but… Those are some of my favourite words to read in a message. Because very often, that is where something new begins.

There Is No Single Colour of Cleopatra

One of the things my customers taught me very quickly is how limiting our first visual associations can be. Say “Cleopatra” and many of us immediately imagine gold with turquoise, lapis blue, emerald green or black. I understand why. These colours have become deeply embedded in the visual language surrounding ancient-Egypt-inspired fashion and in the Cleopatras created by cinema, theatre, illustration and costume design. But then a woman asks for white pearls. And suddenly white feels completely right. Another asks for black and gold and the character becomes darker, sharper and more dramatic. Then someone sends me a brown and rose-gold dress while I am sitting in Sardinia and once again I have to forget what I thought Cleopatra was supposed to look like.

This is one of the reasons I don’t want to design the same Cleopatra over and over again. I don’t believe there is one modern fantasy version every woman has to fit herself into. I would much rather begin with the woman. What is she wearing? What colours does she love? What does her face look like? What kind of entrance does she want to make? Who does she want to become for that one evening? And then we build her Cleopatra.

When You Send Me Your Dress, This Is What Happens in My Head

When a customer sends me a photograph of her dress, I never look only at the colour. Of course colour matters, but then I begin reading the whole silhouette. I notice the neckline, the shoulders, the amount of decoration already happening on the fabric, the proportions, the shape around the waist, the hairstyle she is planning, the makeup, whether the dress itself already demands attention or whether it needs the accessories to create the drama. A deep V-neck immediately gives us beautiful space for a stronger pectoral necklace. If the crown is enormous and extremely detailed, perhaps the earrings should become quieter. If she chooses a smaller cobra tiara, suddenly we can afford to make the necklace or earrings more dominant. Upper-arm cuffs continue the visual language of the crown down the body without overcrowding the face. Wrist cuffs add another point of gold. And if she wants to take the character somewhere more dramatic, theatrical and slightly dangerous, I love adding finger claws.

This is why I find it difficult when people describe accessories as the “finishing touches” of a Cleopatra costume. For me, they aren’t. With Cleopatra, the accessories create the character. If you gave me the choice between an extraordinary expensive dress worn with weak accessories and a relatively simple black or gold dress surrounded by a beautifully considered crown, pectoral, jewellery and arm pieces, I would choose the second almost every time. The dress creates the canvas. The crown tells us who she is. The jewellery completes the language. And when everything begins speaking to everything else, the woman stops looking like someone wearing a costume and starts looking like a character who belongs inside it. That difference fascinates me.

Luxury Is Usually Hidden in the Details Nobody Asks About

Gold is a perfect example. People sometimes imagine that gold is simply gold. I wish it were that easy. We spent years experimenting with different gold paints, finishes and lacquers before arriving at the shade I use today. Some golds become too yellow. Some look flat. Some photograph strangely. Some can make even an intricate handmade object suddenly feel synthetic or costume-like. The gold we use now is something I genuinely love. It has warmth. It has depth. It catches light beautifully. And most importantly, when I place stones, pearls and details against it, it allows them to feel like part of the same object rather than decorations attached afterwards.

Does a customer looking at a finished crown know how many versions of gold existed before that one? Probably not. Does she need to? No. But I think she can feel the result. And that is something I’ve learned about luxury over the years. Very often, luxury lives in decisions the customer will never consciously notice. It is the exact shade of gold. The placement of one stone. The proportion between the pectoral and the neckline. The fact that I changed something nobody asked me to change because when I looked at it, I knew it wasn’t right yet.

A beautiful look is not created simply by adding more expensive things. It is created by harmony. The gold speaks to the stones. The stones speak to the dress. The necklace understands the neckline. The crown understands the proportions of the face. The cuffs repeat a language that has already begun somewhere above them. Nothing feels accidental. And unfortunately, the opposite is also true. One visibly low-quality or disconnected element can pull an otherwise beautiful transformation back into the world of “costume”. I see this surprisingly often with wigs. Someone invests in a beautiful gown and elaborate jewellery and then places a very inexpensive-looking black wig on top, and suddenly the illusion breaks exactly where everyone’s eyes are looking. If you want to create an extraordinary Cleopatra, my advice is actually very simple: pay attention to the things closest to your face. The crown. The hair. The earrings. The necklace. The makeup. Those are the things people see while they are looking at you.

You Don’t Need the Entire Collection to Become Cleopatra

I also don’t want anyone reading this to think that a convincing Cleopatra transformation requires twenty accessories and an unlimited budget. It doesn’t. If your budget is smaller, I would build the look around three strong elements: a tiara or headpiece, a pectoral or statement necklace, and at least one upper-arm cuff. That is my foundation. With those pieces, even a relatively simple dress can already begin to speak the language of the character. If you want to go further, then we add earrings, wrist cuffs, another arm piece, a belt, perhaps finger claws. If you want the full dramatic transformation, we can keep building until there is almost no part of you that hasn’t entered the story.

But more is not automatically better. Intentional is better. Sometimes my job as a designer is to tell a customer what I would add. And sometimes it is to tell her: Stop here. This is enough. Because the goal isn’t to wear the largest possible number of products from my shop. The goal is to make you look extraordinary.

The Cobra I Had Been Designing for Years Before I Fully Understood Why

There is one shape that appears again and again throughout my Cleopatra Collection. The cobra. And if you had asked me before writing this article why I return to it so obsessively, my answer would have been embarrassingly simple: Because Cleopatra has always had a cobra in my head. I have associated the two since childhood. There is the famous story of Cleopatra’s death and the snake, of course, although the exact method of her death remains uncertain. But the cobra is everywhere in the visual mythology surrounding her — films, illustrations, jewellery, costumes — and somehow it became completely inseparable from her in my imagination.

While preparing this article, however, I wanted to go backwards. Past Hollywood. Past modern Halloween costumes. Past the Cleopatra I had absorbed from popular culture. I wanted to look again at what actually survives from her world. And that is when I found something that stopped me. The British Museum holds a tiny pale-blue glass intaglio from the first century BC, identified by the museum as a portrait of Cleopatra VII. Her hair and clothing belong to a Hellenistic visual world, but on her head is an Egyptian royal symbol: a triple uraeus. Three upright cobras. And each one is crowned with a solar disc.

I couldn’t stop looking at it. The uraeus — the upright cobra worn at the forehead — was associated in ancient Egypt with royalty, divine authority and protection. In other words, the cobra’s relationship with Cleopatra goes far deeper than the famous story surrounding her death. It belongs to a much older visual language of kingship and power. And suddenly I was looking at the three-cobra headpieces I have already created with completely different eyes. I had been returning to that shape intuitively for years. Now I understood another layer of why it belonged there. This is one of the things I love most about inspiration: you can work with something for years and it can still teach you something new.

Cleopatra Was More Complicated Than the Costume We Inherited

And this is also where I think we have to be careful when we talk about “the Cleopatra look”. There was no single uniform called Cleopatra. Cleopatra VII was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt, descended from a Macedonian Greek dynasty that had ruled Egypt for centuries. The surviving visual record reflects the complexity of that position. In some images she is represented through Hellenistic conventions; in Egyptian temple imagery she appears within the traditional visual language of a pharaoh.

Then two thousand years happened. Roman writers wrote about her. Artists reinvented her. Theatre reinvented her again. Cinema gave us new Cleopatras. Fashion took pieces of ancient Egyptian imagery and transformed them. Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra became part of our collective visual memory. Jewellery designers, makeup artists, photographers and costume makers added more layers. And now here I am, more than two thousand years later, sitting in an atelier in Liberec making another one.

I think it would be ridiculous for me to pretend that my pieces are historical replicas. They are not. They are contemporary wearable art inspired by a historical woman, ancient Egyptian royal imagery, centuries of artistic interpretation and my own imagination as a designer. But precisely because I work with this history, I want to understand more of it. Respect, for me, doesn’t mean that inspiration has to stop. It means curiosity should never stop. I want to know what the cobra meant before I turn it into a crown. I want to understand which images actually survive and which ones were created centuries later. I want to know where history ends and fantasy begins. And then, once I know that, I can create freely and honestly.

And Now Cleopatra Has Surprised Me Again

There is a funny thing about writing this article. I began it because I wanted to tell you how my Cleopatra Collection grew. Instead, while researching it, Cleopatra gave me another idea. I am currently working on a new Cleopatra Collection, which I hope to introduce in approximately two weeks. I already knew I wanted to return to this world and push it somewhere new. But looking closely at the surviving imagery — especially that tiny portrait with the triple uraeus — has started changing the direction of some of the pieces in my head.

Three cobras. Solar discs. Royal symbolism. Stronger vertical silhouettes. Perhaps a new interpretation of the pectoral. Perhaps something monumental. Perhaps something I haven’t solved yet. I won’t show you everything now, partly because some of it still exists only as fragments in my imagination. But I love the fact that you are reading this at the exact moment when the next chapter is beginning.

Because that is genuinely how my collections grow. Not in one perfect burst of inspiration. They grow through years of looking, making, learning, listening to customers, discovering something new and then suddenly thinking: Wait. What if I tried this? The first Cleopatra Collection grew from a crown I created for myself. Maybe the next one begins with three tiny cobras on a two-thousand-year-old piece of blue glass. I find that incredibly exciting.

If I Became Cleopatra Again This Halloween

And all this research has caused another problem. Now I want to be Cleopatra again. It has been several years since I created that first green-and-gold look for myself. If I did it today, I wouldn’t recreate it. I think this time I would make myself an enormous Cleopatra halo crown. I would create a very strong pectoral covered with stones, serpents and Egyptian-inspired motifs. I would add a belt, upper-arm cuffs and definitely finger claws because apparently subtlety is not something I am interested in when Halloween is involved.

My dress would probably be black or gold. Something elegant enough to let the jewellery become the architecture of the look. I would choose a genuinely beautiful black bob wig with a fringe, perhaps add small braids and decorate them with beads. And I would want to look like a queen. Not quietly. Not in a “that’s a nice costume” way. I mean the kind of transformation where I walk into a room and people look. I would want to be the most beautiful Cleopatra at the party. There. I said it. And maybe I will actually do it this year. Because Cleopatra is never enough.

Why Do We Want to Become Someone Else for One Night?

This is the part of Halloween that interests me more and more as I get older. Why do adults spend weeks planning something they will wear for a few hours? Why do we care whether the stones match? Why do we spend an evening painting our faces, putting on wigs, fastening impossible jewellery and becoming vampires, queens, goddesses, witches or Cleopatras? We know it isn’t real. That’s precisely why it works.

Most of our lives are filled with versions of ourselves that have to function. We work. We answer emails. We pay bills. We look after children. We solve problems. We rush somewhere. We wear things appropriate for meetings, school runs, airports and supermarkets. And then there are rare evenings when we are allowed to ask a completely useless and wonderful question: Who do I want to be tonight?

For me, that is where the magic of an extraordinary costume begins. Not with the dress. Not even with the crown. With permission. Permission to be dramatic. To take up space. To wear far too much gold. To walk into a room knowing people are going to turn around. To enjoy being looked at. To become, for a few hours, the woman who feels as though the entire room belongs to her. And Cleopatra is perhaps one of the most perfect characters for that fantasy.

I Don’t Want to Sell You a Crown You Forget

When I think about what I actually want a customer to feel in one of my Cleopatra looks, the answer isn’t simply “beautiful”. Of course I want her to feel beautiful. But I want more than that. I want her to finish getting ready, look at herself in the mirror and stop for a second because she almost doesn’t recognise the woman looking back. Wow.

I want her to arrive at the party and feel the shift when people notice. I want someone to ask where her crown came from. I want strangers to compliment her. I want her friends to take too many photographs. I want her to feel powerful, extravagant, glamorous, slightly untouchable and completely committed to the woman she decided to become that night. I want her to have the costume everyone talks about the next morning. But even that isn’t the end.

Because the party lasts one night. The memory doesn’t. Maybe ten years later one of those photographs appears on her phone. Maybe she’s thirty-five looking at herself at twenty-five. Maybe her life is completely different. And for a second she remembers the music, the people, the room, the way she felt when she walked through the door. And I hope she thinks: God, I looked incredible. That was such a good Halloween.

That is what I want my work to become part of. Not only a photograph. A memory.

Perhaps That Is Why This Collection Feels Like My Baby

I said earlier that the Cleopatra Collection feels like one of my babies, and I think I finally understand why. It contains so many chapters of my own life. A crown worn by Khloé Kardashian that changed something for me before I even understood what it would become. The first Cleopatra I made for myself. The first women who asked for another colour. The custom white version. The enormous three-cobra commissions. The woman whose rose-gold dress reached me while I was sitting in Sardinia. Years of trying different gold finishes until I found one I loved. Hundreds of conversations about dresses, stones, pearls, deadlines, necklines and impossible ideas. And now, years later, another collection beginning on the tables of my new atelier.

Of course people can imitate an object. They can look at a photograph and reproduce a silhouette. They can make something gold, put a cobra in the centre and create their own version. But they cannot reproduce the path that brought me here. They cannot reproduce the woman in Sardinia. They cannot reproduce the customer who asked for white. They cannot reproduce the first moment I saw Khloé in my crown. They cannot reproduce the years of decisions, mistakes, experiments, conversations and tiny discoveries that slowly became my design language. And perhaps that is what creating from the heart actually means to me. It doesn’t mean nobody else can make a cobra crown. Of course they can. It means I know why mine exists.

So, Who Is Your Cleopatra?

If you have been thinking about becoming Cleopatra this Halloween, I don’t want to begin by telling you which crown to buy. I want you to begin somewhere else. Close your eyes for a second and imagine yourself walking into the room. What does she look like? Is she black and gold? White and luminous? Emerald? Rose gold? Does she wear an enormous crown that arrives before the rest of her does, or a smaller tiara with a spectacular pectoral beneath it? Is she elegant? Dangerous? Regal? Seductive? Completely excessive? Does she need finger claws? Probably.

Now open your wardrobe. Look at the dress you already bought. Look at the neckline. Look at the colours. Look at yourself. And begin building. If you want a simple foundation, start with a tiara, a pectoral or statement necklace and an upper-arm cuff. If you want more drama, add earrings, wrist cuffs, a belt or claws. If you want the entire transformation, then let’s create the entire woman.

And if you cannot find the Cleopatra you have in your head anywhere in my collection, send her to me. Send me your dress. Send me your makeup. Send me three colours. Send me the ridiculous idea you haven’t told anyone because you’re not sure whether it can be made. Those are often my favourite messages. Because this collection has taught me something I never expected when I made that first crown for myself: sometimes the next design doesn’t begin in my imagination. It begins in yours.

And perhaps, somewhere among the women reading this article today, there is another white Cleopatra. Another rose-gold Cleopatra. Another idea that will make me look at this world differently. I hope so. Because more than two thousand years after Cleopatra VII lived, we are obviously still not finished imagining her. And this Halloween, perhaps it is your turn.

Or contact me with your dress, colours and idea, and let’s create your Cleopatra together.