The location Jonathan Cohen selected for his spring presentation,—the artsy Chelsea Hotel (Oh, if those walls could talk!)—hinted at what the designer’s mindset had been while creating his collection; artistic disruption. “This season I was researching impressionism and the punk movement from the ’70s on,” Cohen said at a preview. “I was reading a lot about Impressionism and how radical it was for its time, but now when you look at Impressionism, it’s almost like calendar art. I found [a connection between] the irony in that and the idea that punk is almost becoming a little passé. I grew up in San Diego, which was [home to] the punk skater movement, so it’s very much a part of me.”
It wasn’t difficult to discern the romanticism of the French art movement in Cohen’s florals. Likewise, the curved silhouette of the big-sleeved cape coats (including a khaki one named after editor Sally Singer, who once called the Chelsea Hotel home) wouldn’t look out of place in a painting by Renoir or Manet. The punk element of the collection was invisible to the eye: It was there in Cohen’s DIY method of production, which included collecting and reusing scraps from the production of past collections. It’s those which he delivered to Marina Larroudé for their successful shoe and boot collaboration.
Taking all of this into account, it’s fair to say that Cohen achieved what he set out to do ideologically. That wasn’t as much the case aesthetically. It’s often the case that a stated inspiration is transformed in the making. What was clear on the racks (and less so in the lookbook) was how this designer’s work fits in with the history of Seventh Avenue design. Without being referential, there were pieces that connected back to pioneers of American sportswear like Stephen Burrows and Anne Klein. A collage-print suit and the peplum one had a touch of the ’80s, which is starting to appear in flashes here and there.
As the Impressionists blurred lines, and Punks lived outside of them it’s ironic—that word again—that what distinguished some of the strongest pieces in this collection were straight lines. They defined and detailed a black leather dress. Variously colored threads were used to bring joy and subtle interest to a shapely ecru dress (look 7). The result of Cohen’s deciding to “color inside the lines,” this season was a collection that was pretty and polite, rather than progressive.
