For Jonathan Cohen, next fall starts with Karen O. Well, with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Well, with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing live in New York a few years ago when Cohen was in the audience, dazzled both visually and sonically. He took photos of the light show on his iPhone, and it’s those lights – colorful, pulsating and totally hypnotic – that were referenced throughout this collection. And it just so happened that he left the Yeah Yeah Yeahs show with his footage. It could have been Madonna (saw her in Brooklyn, loved her) or the Cure or Beyoncé. (He also saw—an important life experience this—the original four-girl lineup of Destiny’s Child.) “My favorite part of the concert is at the beginning, when the lights go down,” Cohen said during a recent preview. “That moment when you come out of the pitch black. That’s why we have a lot of black this season.”
There was indeed a lot of black in this collection, but it existed in duality with the light show inspiration. You could think of it as a print on one of those soft and flowy dresses. Cohen does that very well, that combination of rounding out the silhouette and at the same time letting the fabric fall softly. Or as an all-over fabric embroidery on a narrow skirt, where the fabric fragments fall over it like confetti. (It’s become something of a trademark of his, and it has an even better backstory: It’s a thoughtful and frugal way to use leftover fabric, a sustainably-oriented ‘waste-don’t-want-to-not’ approach that has yielded good results .) Or perhaps In the most subtle way, like the luminous gold thread on a rather chic black hourglass jacket, the thread catching the light in the same way a car’s headlights do the lane markings at night. Or indeed, just before the lights come on and a band comes on.
That jacket could also have had a bit of Mrs. O’s spirit in other respects. Cohen paired it with an organic indigo denim skirt, full, short and so layered that flattened, knotted bows are an integral part of the construction. It toned down the formality of the jacket a bit, imbued it with a different spirit, an easier, if no less chic character. That knot motif also appeared elsewhere: on a black satin coat, and even more so on black satin in the form of a sleeveless long evening dress.
The buttons were like other elements in the collection: the light padding used to create volume at the back of the short puff sleeves of a statement cotton dress; the three months it takes to make 15 meters of the colorful tweed that looks static on a TV screen and was used here for a cheerful suit – all done by hand. When it comes to Cohen’s fall, that’s another sensation he wanted to connect with: getting back to what it means to him, aesthetically and emotionally, to do his job. “Where we are now… you keep thinking, what does it mean to be a designer?” he said. “I always thought my purpose was to bring some joy into the world. And it feels like it’s more important than ever.”
