Fashion’s wonder boy
DASHING AND SELF-DEPRECATING, WITH AN OBSESSION FOR DETAIL, MULBERRY’S CREATIVE DIRECTOR JOHNNY COCA IS AN ACCESSORIES HIT-MAKER WHO LOVES STRONG WOMEN
Is Johnny Coca the man to breathe new life into Mulberry?
If you have read anything about Johnny Coca, the relatively new – and frankly magician-like – creative director at Mulberry, you might already know he has a reputation for having a brain like a machine. He’s apt to set himself a design problem – the shape of a heel perhaps – before he goes to bed, allowing his dreams to work like a 3D printer through the night, so that when he wakes he has a solution: fully resolved. But then if you were to make the assumption that upon meeting the 41-year-old Sevillian in person, he might be somewhat cold and robotic, well, nothing could be further from the truth. With his two signature piratical silver hoop earrings (“both masculine and feminine… quite balanced… I like to touch them when I’m thinking”) and sartorial swagger (today, he is head-to-toe Comme Des Garçons, “Last night, Gucci. I like to play!”), Coca is warm and humorous, flamboyant and self-deprecating all at the same time. In fact, he reminds me of a character in an Almodóvar movie – dashing, but with a lot of depth.
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Coca on a couple of occasions now. Each time it has been over tea – served on the prettiest, ditzy-print, traditional English china – at Mulberry’s Kensington HQ, where the designer has been based since being installed at the brand in 2015. Each time, chat has flowed as freely as the Earl Grey – be it Coca acting out his teenage street style (army pants, Texan boots and a shoulder bag grazing the floor “mixing everything, but it was cool!”), expounding on
I love women that really look like WOMEN… But not too, too CLASSIC
his passion for an Arne Jacobsen chair, or his newly kindled fascination for British equestrian garb. And each time, at a certain moment, a silent, impeccably black-clad design assistant has made her soundless presence felt, and escorted Coca back to the studio.
The pressure is on, of course. Management change, the departure of Emma Hill and the vagaries of the luxury market, have meant rocky times for Mulberry in recent years. And Coca is as clear-eyed as anyone about that. “I’m here for a specific objective and that is to make the brand a success.”
THE JOB OF MULBERRY CREATIVE DIRECTOR IS FAMOUSLY FRAUGHT;
the brand being nothing short of a national treasure, its fortunes tracked obsessively by both the financial and the fashion pages. Founded by Roger Saul in Somerset in 1971, it capitalised on the noughties mania for It bags with successive hits from Nicholas Knightly’s Bayswater to Emma Hill’s Alexa. (Chances are you have one in your closet right now.) Not that Coca is any slouch in the It bag department himself, as it happens. As the accessories wizard in Phoebe Philo’s Céline team, where he worked for five years, he earned the nickname ‘Wonder boy’ for his part in the game-changing Trapeze bag, amongst other triumphs. And at Mulberry, he has already busily set about streamlining and updating the bags, bringing lightness and tweaked functionality to the existing back catalogue, designing a beautifully chic new logo; as well as introducing new bag styles. (My favourite, The Amberley, a sleek retro-modern take on a saddlebag in a rich chestnut leather hits stores around May.) But if you are still minded to invest in a classic Bayswater, with its reassuring and familiar oval postman’s lock, it is still there. “We have to protect our old customers, because we have been with them for so many years and they are proud of the brand,” says Coca. “But if you’re not making change, the brand cannot survive.”
Bags are one thing, and I for one love his touches – the punky press-studs and rule-breaking colourways (putty and vermillion!). But it is inevitable that Coca will be judged more harshly in womenswear where he has less form. Plus, his taste in runway showings couldn’t be further from the sugar and the whimsy which characterised his predecessor Emma Hill’s fashion sensibility, which bothers some of the die-hards. However, his second collection, S/S 17, which you see photographed here, was superb: grown-up, wear-forever dresses in a palette borrowed from
Joan Miró himself, mixed with the oxbloods, tie-silks and stripes of a British public school uniform. Watching the collection’s debut, staged in a starkly dramatic industrial setting, I scribbled ‘cinematic’, ‘womanly’ and ‘strong’ in my notebook as the models strode forth like Almodóvar heroines – characterful and with purpose. “I love women that really look like women,” he nods, hands flying for extra emphasis. “But not too, too classic.”
Raised in southern Spain with his mother and two sisters (he was the middle child), Coca describes a childhood where he was at once the ‘little man’ of the house (“my father was not there, so I had to be dad”); and also very feminised, knitting outfits for his sisters’ Barbie dolls. (“I started with a scarf because it was quite easy. And after that a pullover, then crochet…”) Money was not in abundance, but for “each dinner, or invitation, or party, or flamenco we all tried to be really posh and dress up”; the family all taking pleasure in sharing advice as well as wardrobe, to put their looks together. “It was really cool,” he reminisces with a grin. “It’s not like money makes you happy, you know.”
Coca was ill for swathes of his childhood – a problem with his heart, which meant time in hospital – but as with many kids taken out of the normal swing of childhood, it allowed time for his imagination and
intellect to soar. Clearly academically brilliant, with multiple degrees, he moved to Paris to study art, architecture and design at Ecole Boulle and the Ecole des Beaux-arts in Paris, managing to land a job at Louis Vuitton, much to the ire of his mother, who insisted he finish his studies first. “So I accepted the job and studied in parallel. I told Louis Vuitton, ‘I have to take this exam, because if I don’t, my mother will not be happy at all,’” he grins.
At Mulberry, as at LVMH, he prides himself on staying very close to the industrial process of making. Indeed, it was the very fact that Mulberry owns two factories that decided it for him to take the job. “If they didn’t, I would have never accepted,” he states simply. He clearly loves rolling his sleeves up and getting stuck in with the factory teams; and I get the distinct feeling that the admiration is mutual. Tellingly, when he left Céline, the factory craftspeople with whom he had created all the beautiful prototypes in their five and a half years of intense graft together, made a presentation to him of all the little mini bags as his farewell gift – and Coca repaid the honour with a special dinner just for the craftspeople to say goodbye. “I was so in love with them and they were so in love with me.”
LACK OF PRETENSION AND – WHISPER IT – ‘NICENESS’ ARE CLEARLY A BADGE OF PRIDE FOR COCA.
When he describes the fashion courtship by which he lured in the bleeding-edge cool stylist of the moment, Lotta Volkova (of Vetements and Balenciaga fame) to help on Mulberry’s last show (“I really wanted someone from the outside to give a twist”), I’m fascinated to learn what cemented the pair’s creative partnership was the stylist’s egalitarian approach to everyone in the studio. “Stylists can be posh and pretentious and a bit arrogant and I don’t like to have people like that around me; these people who are kind to you, the designer, but they treat other people like nothing.”
As a man for whom manners are everything, it doesn’t surprise me that a certain snarkiness that lurks out there in social media among some more fervent Mulberry traditionalists hurts him, but it’s clearly not going to stop him pushing the brand forward or doing what he thinks is right. He fell for a diverse, out-there British artistic sensibility in the ’80s (Vivienne Westwood, Alexander Mcqueen, photographer Nick Knight are the names that inspire him – in fact Knights’ portfolio of Linda Evangelista and roses are the reason he used those bold monochrome rose prints in his first show for A/W 16. “I was so impressed with these flowers”). Experimentation and boundary pushing are embedded in his soul.
OUR TIME IS NEARLY UP. THE STUDIO ASSISTANT HAS MADE HER SOUNDLESS ENTRANCE,
but still our conversation sweeps on: his love of artist Carmen Herrera, the 101-year-old Cuban American abstract painter, whose work has just been celebrated at The Whitney Museum in New York; the music of Ana Isabelle; the beauty of Seville in April. It’s Coca’s habit to move constantly between London, Spain, Italy and Paris where he has a home and where his beloved younger sister and her baby also live. “You have to be very organised,” he admits.
So where and when does the Johnny Coca machine recharge? “At home, in Spain, with my mother. She cooks all the time. It’s funny because you can be 15, 20, 40 years old, but still it’s the same – you just eat all the time. And talk and talk and talk.”