Ulla Johnson traveled extensively as a child, although she mostly grew up in New York. His parents were archaeologists and uprooting was common. She spent some time in Tehran, Iran, Damascus, Syria, or Germany. An openness to the world that the American, of Serbian and Danish origins, put to use her creativity, launching in 1998, at only 24 years old, her women’s fashion label in New York.
A solid and independent label, with now more than 400 points of sale around the world, including Net-a-Porter or 24S (the Bon Marché site) in France, and more than a hundred employees. Known and recognized, the brand has also been on the official New York fashion week calendar since 2016.
However, it was not so much a question of trends or looks in her childhood and adolescence. “Fashion was not really part of our daily lives, even though my mother often brought back clothes and objects made by local artisans from her travels. At home, for example, we only read the New Yorker ! As well as many art and history books, which my parents collected. But when I was sick or homesick, I would ask my mother to go buy me fashion magazines. It also happened to me sometimes to play the imaginary invalids just to leaf through one “, she explains, by videoconference, from her New York premises, dressed in a pretty white ruffled blouse and tinkling her many golden bracelets against her desk.
The particularity of the Johnson style? An elegant femininity, subtle, a bit romantic. We find in his wardrobe very pretty vaporous dresses in light silk cut on the bias, baggy trousers with a narrowed waist, frilly evening dresses cut in thick cotton, or even perfectly adjusted zipped parkas. What do these pieces have in common? They are almost all served by bright colors and strong prints, most often geometric or floral.
“I have an obsession with flowers. My homes both have beautiful gardens, one in Manhattan and the other in Montauk, Long Island. I have always picked and arranged flowers, as far back as I can remember. My mother always had bouquets at home. It amuses me to note that, in nature, very disparate colors, and a priori very distant, can rub shoulders and be incredible together. My love of floral prints mainly comes from there,” explains the designer.
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