New York is on a minimal streak, with designers looking back at the clean lines and monochrome palette of the late ’90s as a launching pad. But not Ulla Johnson. She’s never been a trend chaser, and this season her penchant for prints and obsession with handcrafts are setting her apart.
Johnson held her show at Powerhouse Arts, the former Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company’s central power station that was converted by a generous philanthropist and Herzog de Meuron into an about-to-open not-for-profit arts hub in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. The warehouselike space was Ulla-fied with curved hanging screens suspended from the ceiling and nautilus shell sand paintings decorating the floor, chosen to help convey the theme she took for spring—“a meditation on the circle as a quintessential, divine form of nature.”
The show included groups of vibrant printed looks, the result of a collaboration with artist Shara Hughes, the subject of a recent Vogue profile, who lent three landscapes for reproduction on dresses, daywear separates, and outerwear. Johnson is known for her printed frocks, but these were bolder and freer than her usual register; it was somehow clear that they began their lives as paintings and weren’t designed on a computer for reproduction on cloth.
The circle theme was present from the opening look; the fiery sun is the centerpiece of Hughes’s painting Tuck. Go looking for circles elsewhere and they pop up on many pieces: on a lavish fil coupé used for a trench, in the gradated geometric crochet of a sleeveless dress, and in the pinwheel rosette technique, called “yo-yo,” of another willowy number. A group of lace-edge silk slip dresses and camisole-and-skirt combos provided a more understated counterpoint. Of course, the circles are of little consequence to Johnson’s customers; they’ll respond to these pieces because they’re special, feminine, and pretty.
