At 27, Reese Cooper has officially entered that stage in life where he needs to be ready for the wedding circuit. But when his cousin tied the knot in South Carolina recently, he found himself in the ironic position, after nearly a decade of designing, of having to hit a ‘mass-pirational’ retailer for a last-minute suit on his way to the airport. “I was like, ‘This is ridiculous, I need to fix that,’” the designer recalled in a showroom in the Upper Marais where both his namesake menswear collection and his lighter-priced RCOS line were on display.
For spring, Cooper set about recalibrating outdoorsy California casual with a more mature, tailored, and mostly unisex offer that will easily pass muster in more elevated settings while still retaining sporty touches. Ripstop cords cinched the waist on blazers, a trench and a Harrington jacket in nylon; oversized cargo pockets gave button-downs or a printed poncho a fresh functionality, yet also looked crisp and sophisticated on a black, white and red houndstooth. As ever, his signature carabiner, a piece custom-designed by a former aerospace engineer befriended over Instagram, provided a throughline.
Of his process, the designer explained, “My favorite thing personally is to take something that you would traditionally find, then take the right thing and put it in the wrong place or the other way around.” Not that anything looked out of place here. Last Tuesday, Cooper’s posse of chosen family, among them the stylist Savannah White, traveled with him an hour north of L.A. to the Angeles National Forest. There, his models posed on a rock in the San Gabriel River, in a location the designer had discovered on a hike. In a telling detail, he shot this lookbook with a thumbs-up from his friends over at the local Forest Service (look for new developments in that budding relationship next season). It speaks volumes about Cooper’s interest in building on community, a philosophy he absorbed from Virgil Abloh. “If you’re doing something fun that people want to be around, that should be the focus,” he said. One doesn’t often hear that during the fashion week swirl. Let’s see where that takes him next.