Ulla Johnson Establishes Her Brand Codes While Celebrating Artistic Expression

By The Citizen on September 9, 2024

There’s a lot of variation in the New York Fashion Week schedule these days, but Ulla Johnson has remained a relatively consistent presence, giving showgoers a serene, laid-back start to their Sunday mornings with her colorfully bohemian wares. She’s also now celebrating 25 years in business — this, too, is an impressive feat for an independent brand in 2024. Along with other recent milestones, like store openings and expansion into new categories like denim, the anniversary provides a slightly more seriously lens through which to view new collections.

While Johnson is certainly thinking about her brand’s customer, DNA and opportunities for growth, she’s also doubling down on her passion for artistic expression. For Spring 2025, she once again developed her show with assists from female artists: The work of late abstract impressionist painter Lee Krasner (who happened to be married to artist Jackson Pollock) informed much of the collection, from print to color to fabrication; and author Mary Gabriel (known for her book “Love and Capital: Karl and Jenny Marx and the Birth of a Revolution,” about Karl Marx and his wife) penned an essay that served as its show notes.

“I think this collaboration with Krasner was years in the making,” Johnson told me after the show, “and a real testament to how involved we are with the arts as well as our love of color and print and joy.”

Johnson’s deep appreciation and affection for Krasner could be felt as she spoke with press “backstage” (a sun-drenched, flower-filled garden). “I have had lifelong affinity for her gesture, her use of color, the place and time that she inhabited as a woman, essentially making [her mark] with her husband, Jackson Pollock, and then continuing this work for four decades after his passing,” she said. “She fought very hard to prove herself as a painter in her own right.”

In addition to Krasner’s nature-inspired color palette and paint strokes, Johnson’s interest in gender roles comes across in the collection as well. For the second season in a row, she put men on the runway, but their looks were not made differently from the rest of the collection, she clarified.

“I’m always thinking about this dialogue between masculine and feminine… Women get put in menswear all the time, but not vice versa,” she noted. “These were not looks that were cut for men; they were cut as part of our ready to wear. I think that this false binary between menswear and womenswear seems quite outdated.”

Plus, why not open the brand up to more customers? “We have so many men in our orbit that also love color and love prints and love, perhaps, a different silhouette than is typically presented.”

Without straying from her well-honed brand of elevated boho-chic, Johnson pushed her designs further through new fabrications, techniques and a broader mix of silhouettes.

“We did a great deal of exploration and development with really luxe surface textures,” she explained, like the “eyelash”-like fringe textures, created with new Italian mills, that moved beautifully on the runway. Other dresses were imbued with a gold sheen that read softer than you might expect from a metallic. “I really love this gilded effect, which we also translated onto the hand-crochet,” she highlighted. “And then in echoing this kind of wavelike gesture that you find in Krasner’s painting, we worked with that loose hand to do embroideries on tulle and also on chiffon.”

While dresses and eveningwear — a growing category for the brand — were definitely focal points of the collection, there were also a lot of separates with utilitarian touches.

“As much as we are always trying to be true to our core tenets and our brand codes, I think that we’ve evolved our silhouettes so much,” she shared. “We launched denim a few years ago and that’s been very successful, too. So to be able to really dress the woman for all of herself is really exciting.”

See the full Ulla Johnson Spring 2025 collection below.