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.
