THE INVESTMENT DRESSER
The romantic heroine dress you can wear 365 days a year
Dressing like a whimsical, romantic literary heroine is very much a thing right now – the logical explanation for channelling a character from a Sunday night period drama, give or take a corset, is that it’s an escapist, sweetness-andlight antidote to a rather grim sociopolitical landscape. But it is also an effortless, year-round style solution.
The woman creating the purest version of this fantasy is Rebecca Hessel Cohen, founder of the US label Loveshackfancy. “She’s running through the fields when the sun is rising,” Hessel Cohen muses of her “girl”. More realistically, she’s strolling along a beach in the Hamptons or browsing a market in Brooklyn. Since this summer, she’s been breezing around the Cotswolds (where the brand is stocked at Amanda Brooks’s Cutter Brooks boutique in Stowon-the-wold) and from next week, when the brand launches a pop-up at Harrods, she’ll be flitting through Knightsbridge. “We have fallen in love with Loveshackfancy’s dreamy, ethereal aesthetic,” says Maria Milano, Harrods’ merchandise manager.
The Laura Ashley-esque designs are unashamedly pretty: they come in silks or fresh cottons, printed with ditsy florals, covered in ruffles and bows. They’re fair-weather designs, but it’s a 365-days-a-year proposition once you add on layers of the embroidered cardigans or Fair Isle jumpers that the label also offers. Then make like Elizabeth Bennet and add a pair of stompy boots.
Loveshackfancy was born out of Hessel Cohen’s dream of the perfect bridesmaid dress. “I got married in 2010. Of course it was this amazing, beautiful celebration of love, but I wanted to do Great Expectations meets south of France. I just couldn’t find any bridesmaids’ dresses, so my mum and I made them,” says the former Cosmopolitan fashion editor.
Eight years, countless word-ofmouth enquiries, two exquisitely dressed little girls (Scarlett, five, and Stella Lou, three), a childrenswear line and 35 employees later, the designer has coined a new spin on boho chic, though she has now given up hand-dyeing silk herself in favour of producing in India and Peru.
She reels off The Nutcracker, Alice in Wonderland, The Secret Garden and Marie Antoinette among her inspirations but there is a modern fairy-tale element, too; early in the brand’s genesis, Gwyneth Paltrow just happened to be at Hessel Cohen’s mother-in-law’s home doing a shoot for Goop. She was shown the dresses and Paltrow fell in love. A Goop collaboration followed.
The look has stood the test of time and Hessel Cohen wants her designs to do the same. “I try to create something that’s for these different generations of girls and women. They’ve become mementos, something that hopefully will be passed down from mothers to daughters.”