Acts of reinvention were on the mind of American designer Ulla Johnson this season, choosing New York’s Gotham Park to show her latest collection on Monday morning. The park, which sits under the Brooklyn Bridge on its Manhattan side, has over the past century, been a shopping parade, a skate park (Brooklyn Banks, as it was previously known, was the cradle of street skating in the 1980s), before falling into disrepair and eventually locked away to passers-by.
In 2020, a grassroots movement to save the skatepark and reclaim Brooklyn Banks began. The newly named Gotham Park opened in 2023 and will eventually stretch nine acres and include a detailed planting project to make the park into a green space. ‘We all know the importance of green space within the urban landscape, especially as the world changes,’ said Johnson, who, after the show, donated 750 native plants and 12 trees in a collaboration with Field Operations, the agency responsible for landscaping the High Line. ‘Creating these spaces of oasis is, I think, critical to the future of our urban life together.’
The project is a response, says Johnson, to the ephemeral nature of a runway show. ‘There's so much impermanence to what happens in these 15 minutes,’ she said. ‘As we grow and develop, we have to think about what we stand for: having a lasting mark, bringing beauty to where we are [and making things] that live past the moment are all incredibly important to us.’
Gotham Park also provided an apt stage for a collection which Johnson said was an ode to the ‘self-expression’ and ‘self-invention’ of New York women (‘all New York’s runway,’ began the collection notes). ‘It’s this lived experience that we create every day: the act, the performance of dress, and the act of coming together with loved ones, but also with passersby,’ she said. ‘That impromptu joy that only New Yorkers understand, when somebody compliments their outfit or when there’s that unstudied interaction between strangers.’
It lent the collection an eclectic mood, which Johnson described as ‘urban pastoral’, juxtaposing the elements of a city uniform (tailored jackets and shorts; trench coats; macintosh jackets), with moments of whimsy – gowns came ruffled or adorned with flowers, while shoes featured raffia pom-poms. Which in turn brought it back to Gotham Park.
‘Showing in this space, we were thinking about the idea of appreciating a moment of beauty or a flower against something that feels quite industrial, gritty, you know, true to itself,’ she said. ‘It’s the tension between something very lyrical and something very urban.’
Stay tuned to wallpaper.com for more coverage from New York Fashion Week S/S 2026.
