A Pink Parade at the End of the World

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/14/style/loveshackfancy.html

Version 0 of 1.

NASHVILLE — There are two women who travel the country just about every time LoveShackFancy opens a new store, which has now happened 11 times since the pandemic began.

They descend on these stores, along with sometimes dozens of other women and girls, all dressed with precise whimsy, as if they’re attending a tea party on some decadent estate and not standing outside a small storefront, where it’s lightly raining and construction workers are grinding into asphalt just a few feet away.

On a recent Friday, this was not their chosen reality. Their reality was LoveShackFancy’s arrival in Nashville — to this pink brick building painted with even pinker flowers and bows, punctuated by an explosion of pink and white balloons. Through the windows, they could see pink floral wallpaper behind pink floral curtains. Even the garbage can on the street corner had been spray-painted a medicinal shade of pink, just moments before the first customers arrived to a preview on Thursday.

“We’re like the LoveShackFancy groupies,” said Rose Anderson, who arrived, as she does to all of the store openings, with her best friend Lori Gill.

The women visited the Nashville store two days in a row; on the first, Ms. Anderson, 48, wore a white knit minidress and cardigan set, printed with pink cherries and strawberries, trimmed with pink gingham and striped ruffles. (Together, the pieces sell for $620.) Ms. Gill, 52, wore a sleeveless pink maxidress with white polka dots, ruffled from the waist down ($625).

Ms. Anderson, who splits time between Florida and New Jersey, and Ms. Gill, who lives in New Jersey, said they had been wearing LoveShackFancy for years, after first encountering the brand in department stores.

“I think it was the girliness that attracted us to it,” Ms. Anderson said.

Ms. Gill agreed. “We’re both very girlie, so anything with ruffles and bows,” she said. “I would say 90 percent of how I dress every day is LoveShackFancy.”

“And then, I don’t know,” Ms. Anderson said, referring to the brand’s transition, which began in 2018, from their favorite brand at Saks Fifth Avenue to their favorite brand with 14 stores across the country: “Whatever happened, they just took it to a whole other level.”

What happened was a strategic shift driven by a few factors, among them a realization by LoveShackFancy’s owners that its customers behaved like fans. They would drive for hours and wait in line to shop at LoveShackFancy’s small, antiques-filled stores, dressing up for openings and events with the same verve as Comic Con cosplayers, and buy out its many collaborations (like summer dresses with Target in 2020, gone online within minutes).

All of this culminated in growth in net sales of about 125 percent from 2020 to 2021, according to the company — but also a growth in bewilderment among people outside its customer base. In a moment marked by a pandemic, war, social strife and a generally ceaseless sense of doom, where was this pretty, brash, moneyed and altogether doom-free brand coming from?

Half her stores may be in the South, but the founder and creative director of LoveShackFancy, Rebecca Hessel Cohen, is a New Yorker.

She was raised on the Upper East Side, first attending the girls’ prep school that inspired “Gossip Girl.” After school, she said, she would loiter at either Betsey Johnson’s uptown boutique or inside the fashion closet of Seventeen magazine, where her mother worked as creative director.

Though her mother dressed her in vintage Victorian dresses from a young age, Ms. Cohen’s style in her 20s — much of which she spent as a fashion editor at Cosmopolitan — leaned more American Apparel than Laura Ashley, she said, with miniskirts, vintage tees, high heels and brightly colored exposed bra straps.

In 2013, Ms. Cohen left Cosmopolitan to start her own brand, inspired to design after creating the bridesmaids’ dresses for her wedding to Todd Cohen, a real estate developer, in 2010. Today the couple are business partners. They also have two daughters (ages 6 and 8) and homes in the West Village and Southampton. Like Ms. Cohen, Mr. Cohen is a native New Yorker.

Earlier this year, while planning her 40th birthday party, Ms. Cohen decided she wanted “iconic New York.” So she booked the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel.

“I stepped into, like, my dream brain,” Ms. Cohen said. By which she meant that her February party ended up having burlesque dancers, a confetti drop, musicians on stilts, truckloads of floral arrangements, an opulent tablescape with 15 cakes (not all of them edible), a velvet-blazer-wearing husband reading poetry from a Juliet balcony, and an aerialist who, while hanging from the ceiling, poured champagne into coupes held on trays by servers in French court costume. All of these things, it should now go without saying, involved the color pink.

The party was meant to evoke “Versailles romance with a twist, gone bad a bit,” said Ms. Cohen, who that night wore an extreme high-low skirt made from hundreds of yards of tulle and silk organza flowers — again, in shades of pink — and a lacy corset. Like all of the lace used in LoveShackFancy designs, this fabric was vintage, she said, coming from Ms. Cohen’s “massive collection” of textiles sourced from the late 1800s onward, much of it from England and France.

“I feel like I was British in my past life, for sure,” Ms. Cohen said. “And French.”

But this was not just a 40th birthday party. While it began as a private event, it became LoveShackFancy’s unofficial New York Fashion Week party, with the brand inviting a few influencers and reporters at the last minute (“some young fun people,” as Ms. Cohen said) and using the night as a kind of high-budget photo shoot to introduce its new line of party dresses and evening gowns.

Ms. Cohen later posted footage from the party to Instagram at least 19 times, including one video captioned with a Carrie Bradshaw quote and another with the declaration that “the Gilded Age is back.” In the images, her hair fell in beachy waves, and one arm was often thrown to the sky — a signature pose. She wanted her nearly 70,000 followers (and 837,000 on LoveShackFancy’s account) to feel as if they were there. “It was for everyone,” Ms. Cohen said.

Stacy Lilien, the company’s president, whose birthday is coincidentally the same day as Ms. Cohen’s, said: “It could have just been her 40th birthday, but it allowed all of the dreamers of LoveShackFancy to feel like they’re a part of it.” (The company declined to disclose the cost of the roughly 240-person event, but rooms at the Plaza run about $1,000 per night, and the rate for hosting a wedding, for example, starts at about $350 per guest.)

This commitment to extravagance and world building is something Ms. Cohen has in common with a more veteran fixture of the Upper East Side: Ralph Lauren, whose flagship mansion is eight blocks away from LoveShackFancy’s store.

More than most of its peers, LoveShackFancy is selling an atmosphere and attitude, an invitation to what Ms. Cohen has called “the ultimate girls’ club.” Depending on the shopper’s age — customers generally range from tweens to 40-somethings — sometimes the vibe is romantic and innocent. (The little girls’ selection is generally considered “dad approved,” as Ms. Lilien explained — girlish without being promiscuous.) Other times the aesthetic is cottagecore on ketamine.

Ms. Cohen, too, has tightly tied her identity to the brand, not only with the hybrid birthday-brand party, but with her family’s spring break vacations, for example, which she combines with ad campaign shoots. She scatters framed photos of her family on the shelves of her stores. When she attends a store opening, she can’t make it around the room without a few teenage girls asking for selfies. She is generous with her time and the diversity of angles.

“Tell them we’re having technical difficulties,” Liam McKessar, the brand’s senior director for marketing and communications, said to another employee heading for the line of about 35 people waiting for LoveShackFancy to open its Nashville doors. She had filled a fuzzy pink western hat with boot-shaped sugar cookies — treats to distract the crowd from the fact that the store was supposed to open more than 10 minutes ago.

“You should have seen the line in Charleston,” said Mr. McKessar, who has been responsible for keeping capacity in check at busy store openings. “It was like Supreme just dropped something.”

Soon the Cohen family arrived — running late in part because of that street construction — and within minutes the founder had a pair of scissors in her hand. The crowd cheered as Ms. Cohen cut a wide pink ribbon spread across the doorway. Across the street, onlookers in fleece jackets and jeans watched incredulously, occasionally pointing their phones at the assembly of women in their mismatched uniforms of floral dresses, chunky pastel cardigans, metallic boots and high-end designer bags (most commonly Louis Vuitton or Chanel).

Inside the store, upcycled embellished rodeo shirts were selling quickly, along with the brand’s most popular piece: the ruffle miniskirt ($225).

“The prep school girls, they’re all in the ruffle miniskirt, and so are the college girls,” said Ms. Cohen, who theorizes that her brand has filled an aspirational vacuum created by the decline of teen magazines — the bibles of her youth — and dearth of preppy luxury brands. Lilly Pulitzer, Kate Spade and Tory Burch don’t occupy the same enviable status they once did with young, well-off women. “There isn’t anyone else, really, for them to look to,” she said.

Over the last year, the media narrative around LoveShackFancy is that it has become a hot new Gen Z brand — a perception that was amplified during the TikTok phenomenon known as Bama Rush, in which would-be sorority pledges at the University of Alabama shared their OOTDs (outfits of the day) with varyingly intense Southern accents. “My shoes are Shein, my jewelry is Kendra Scott, my dress is LoveShackFancy.”

“‘Don’t show it to anyone!’ — that was my first response,” Ms. Cohen recalled. She was a Manhattanite who attended New York University and didn’t understand what was happening. “I was like, ‘We are going to be pigeonholed.’ Then I just kept watching it and learning.”

It is not a coincidence that since Bama Rush, the new store openings have included Southern cities with concentrations of young, affluent residents and tourists — like Miami, Charleston, Houston and now Nashville — though Ms. Cohen pointed out these aren’t necessarily “college towns,” but “honestly, more prep school towns,” she said.

While Mr. Cohen said he still wanted to open a store in Alabama, the next cities on LoveShackFancy’s roster include Scottsdale, Aspen and London, the first international location, along with a reopening of the Sag Harbor store. A third of revenue now comes from the stores, the company said, with the other thirds coming from wholesale orders and online sales. (Before the pandemic, wholesale made up 70 percent of the business, a system that wasn’t working particularly well for independent brands.)

There’s also a new Manhattan office in the works, which Ms. Cohen said will look “literally like our stores combined with the Ritz Paris.” And there are early conversations around size expansion, Ms. Lilien said, as the core line currently ends around size 12 and extra large. More active are the conversations around bringing in V.I.P. customers looking to be dressed for major events. This past weekend, the 32-year-old sister of Nicola Peltz wore a custom LoveShackFancy gown to the wedding of Ms. Peltz and Brooklyn Beckham.

One thing the brand doesn’t seem to be worrying about is whether its aesthetic has run its course. Ms. Cohen admits that the cottagecore and prairie trends, which both peaked in 2020, have lost steam.

“People now are wanting to be more colorful and fun and a bit more sexy,” she said. LoveShackFancy’s “girl” is “always going to feel at home in her garden with her florals, or dreaming about a garden, or wanting to go have a cute little picnic. But I think now she wants to dress up for night. She wants to change as many times as she can and show it all, feel it all.”

“All our Victorians, by the way, we make in black,” Ms. Cohen added, though they’re only sold online.

At a party given inside a Nashville diner the night before the store opening, where only about five people wore black dresses, Christina Coniglio, the senior design director of LoveShackFancy, said she pushes her team to think “weirder.”

“Nobody wants the same dress anymore,” she said, while a group of in-line skaters glided around the restaurant to Whitney Houston. (The Dolly Parton impressionist had already wrapped up.) “The housedresses and Victorians, there’s so much of that in the market. What’s that weird, kooky element you can add? That spirited little flash of newness?”

Ms. Cohen arrived as the discussion turned to pink and whether there was any shade of pink LoveShackFancy avoided.

Ms. Coniglio said no. Ms. Cohen thought for a moment.

“Sometimes if I don’t like it, I just change the environment,” she said.