Christian Cowan Shoots For The Stars With 90s Runway Icons

You can’t deny that Christian Cowan is New York Fashion Week’s king of camp. A certified conduit of pop culture, the designer known for his fabulous pageantry and endless list of iconic collaborations (Teletubbies, The Power Puff Girls, and Lil Nas X just to name a few), has long been a beacon of playful optimism in a city that too often takes itself too seriously. While his A/W 24 collection ticked all the boxes of a great Christian Cowan show — sparkle, shine, and collaborations with Adobe and shoemaker TOMS — it was defined by a subtle refinement that signals a grown-up direction for the brand.

Presented at The Harmonie Club in the Upper East Side, Cowan’s latest was a take on the city’s ‘ladies who lunch’. Evoking all the glamour of New York’s upper echelon, the silhouettes harkened to the 60s with mod mini dresses and feather-trimmed off-shoulder floor-length gowns. Elements that have come to define the designer’s quintessential brand of glamour were rife, including a liberal use of sequins and feathers. Still, it wasn’t at all a selection of greatest hits, but rather a reinforcement of Cowan’s recurring motifs as house codes. Notably the use of the five-pointed star.

‘’Astronomy compels the soul to look upward and lead us from this world to another’’, Cowan tells me over Zoom ahead of the show. The quote from Plato was told to him by his father, who passed away a year ago, and is something of the ethos for the collection. He tells me it was his father who piqued his interest in astronomy from an early age gifting him a telescope for his birthday. ‘Fashion and astronomy are the same. You’re essentially looking at these dots in the sky but what they represent and the imagination they unlock, the endless possibilities, the infinite outcomes that exist in space, is so exciting to me.’

There’s always been a transformative quality to Cowan’s designs with his OTT embellishments becoming a favourite for musicians like Kim Petras and Gwen Stefani, along with Real Housewives of Salt Lake City star Meredith Marks. ’You can throw on a garment and it can take you to places you’ve never been before. A new person, a different confidence level,’ he says.

While quiet luxury remains the trend du jour, Cowan’s work (refreshingly) has always been about upping the ante. For his Paris Fashion Week debut last season, he made headlines with models donning giant fur balls down the runway. Even though his A/W 24 presentation was anything but quiet — one of my favourite looks being a shaggy rendition of the uniform of New York fashion’s First Lady Carolina Herrera — the designer took a notably restrained approach to his usual camp-imbued glamour.

What was presented was an honest, and optimistic proposition that bridged the designer’s numerous loves, including the women who inspired him. ‘I like the camp-ness of uptown. I find the ladies of the Upper East Side amazing and hysterical in the best way possible,’ he says. ‘They’re real champions of the arts. They put their money where their mouth is’.

This notion was most evident in the casting. In lieu of fresh-faced ingenues, or even street casting, a majority of Cowan's cast comprised 90s runway models, including Emily Sandberg, Nelly Pakh, Jenny Brunt, Elanor Simon, Bethany Nagy, Giannie Couji and Duyen. ‘The women who I’m inspired by are real women. They’re strong, they’re confident, they’re mature. They’ve been through it all and they’re so cool for that reason,’ he explains. ‘I don’t know why I haven’t done it since the beginning to be honest’.

Of course, it wouldn’t be a Christian Cowan collection without a collaboration. This time around he worked with TOMS on a capsule collection of shoes, as well as a boundary-pushing design with Adobe. Cowan tells me that it was hours of doom scrolling on social media that introduced him to Adobe’s Primrose Project, a state-of-the-art digital dress that changes with the press of a button.

‘I want to always evolve with what’s available,’ Cowan tells me. ‘As an artist, you want to use all the tools at your disposal’. The show-stopping finale featured his take on Adobe’s Primrose Project; an A-line mini dress crafted from fish scale sequins and his signature star paillettes. Utilising reflective light-diffuser modules and liquid crystals (which are used in smart lighting technology) to change its appearance, the technological feat was programmed with eight visualisations for a truly dynamic design. ‘I don’t want to stay in the past. I don’t want to be sewing satin my whole life,’ he says.