Last weekend, the emerging designer took over New York City’s Pianos for a punk rock launch party celebrating her debut collection.
The first time I stepped into an Emerson Isa piece, I was seventeen years old. It was the summer of 2016, and I found myself at a pre-college fashion program with Emerson Kobak, sitting next to the budding designer in an open studio during orientation. She had a brand, she told me, and wanted to do a photoshoot for her developing website. We put together a team and I tried on her neoprene garments, posing for the camera in black-and-white striped shorts and a crop top.
Nearly a decade later, I’m in Emerson’s Williamsburg home, slipping into the samples from her first fully produced collection, Girls To The Front. Much like the designer in front of me, her brand has evolved over the past ten years, and the space around us gives me clues to this new chapter. Riot Grrrl posters and art school projects hanging on her wall, a pink backsplash in the kitchen next to an Emerson Isa branded pot holder. Black and pink fabric scraps scattered around her living room, a label maker printing party invites. Flipping through racks of tutus and mini dresses while catching up with the creative mind behind them, it was difficult to decipher where Emerson Kobak (the person) ends and Emerson Isa (the brand) begins. Does she live in her studio or does she work in her apartment? The two are intrinsically linked, one influencing the other as they grow up together.
When I ask about the origins of the brand, she takes us even further back than our time that summer, to long before she knew how to drape fabric or develop a pattern into a lacy dress. To her, the essence of Emerson Isa began the second she learned how to sew at eight years old, and its trajectory is a continuous line from her childhood recorder case business ‘LOXO’ (‘Lots of Hugs and Kisses,’ of course) and high school charity shows to her time at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York and eventually to last weekend, when she sold out Piano’s for the Girls To The Front launch party.
“Right now, my brand is a mix of edginess and softness. But my visual identity has gone through a lot of different stages — and I think that’s just growing up,” she tells me, affirming my observation that her label feels like an extension of herself. “A big part of my brand is like showing the evolution of womanhood and I feel like if you look at things from say like my first fashion show in high school versus my stuff now it’s polar opposites and I think it’s kind of beautiful to look at that. It’s funny, but it’s also beautiful. Because we’re all changing all the time. So it’s nice to know that you don’t have to be stuck in anything. So I have my visual identity now, which I feel really strong about, but also if it changes in the next couple of years, I’m so fine with that. Not only am I changing, but my customer is changing and the world is changing, so it’s obviously going to shift based on what’s happening.”
If she had to put a start date on this version of Emerson Isa, however, it might be 2020, when the silver lining of Covid quarantine was uninterrupted time to develop her branding, visual identity, and online presence. “I’d been making stuff and sewing stuff and doing all of this for so long, but in recent years, I was like, ‘I want this to be a brand. I want people to associate the things I make with a brand.’”
The brand of Emerson Isa is better described as a world, or perhaps a universe. Every aspect, from her playful logo and retro-tinted visuals to the emerging rock music and eclectic guest list at her launch party, invites you into an alternate reality, a cross between a 90’s feminist punk gig and a slumber party game of truth or dare. Dark eyeshadow and liner with rosy cheeks and braided hair, black lace with pink ribbons. The power and strength of each individual mixed with the soft, inexplicable love formed by her growing community. It’s a nostalgia-infused view of the future.
Her community is full of creatives, comedians and musicians alike, including Stef Dag, Elio Lynx, and The Dutch Kills, Kobak’s favorite NYC band who she got to perform at the party. “I can’t even count how many of their shows I’ve been to,” she tells me. “The energy that they have is so inspiring – so raw, unfiltered, passionate, angry. That’s what Emerson Isa is. When I hear their music, I’m like, ‘this is what I want my brand to look like.’” Watching them on stage in head to toe Emerson Isa, it just made sense.
But to get to this place where a room is full of guests wearing her looks, the designer had to scale up from the one-of-one handmade customs she was used to designing for customers. “I was hand-making everything, going fabric shopping, making the patterns, sewing every piece myself, and then selling them at different pop-ups and online or through commissions,” she tells me. “And then this past year has been me transitioning to manufacturing, so I can really focus on the brand and more people can wear the things I make.”
Finding factories and manufacturers is a daunting process for any young designer, but luckily Kobak had some help from Perpl Fashion Consulting, a company that works with individuals and teams to develop and grow their clothing lines. “It’s so hard, it’s a crazy process. So I’ve been freelancing for a lot of different designers, trying to learn as much as I can. And then at one of my jobs, I met this woman who has her own consulting company, Perpl Fashion. I started working for her consulting company, designing for different brands that work for her or that hire her. And then eventually I was like, ‘you’re helping all these brands, can we talk about my brand?’”
“Since then, we’ve been full force Emerson Isa. The company is run by her and her husband and they’ve helped me find factories that they’ve worked with. It’s been really nice having this in between because starting a brand by yourself and not being perfectly well-versed in manufacturing and the amount that has to go into it has been a blessing and they’ve just really helped me with all those aspects of it. I learned a lot of my technical skills at FIT, but everything else has been on the job or doing my own brand. I’m having to learn so much about starting a business and working with a production team. And that’s why it’s so nice to be working with Perpl; they’re guiding me in so many ways.”
This mentorship is one of the things Kobak is most grateful for, and she’s giving that back to others in every way she can. “Since I was little, I always wanted to give back in some way,” she explains. “I’ve been fortunate to do what I want to do and I just want to be able to give that back. Fashion can be something that feels superficial sometimes, so if you know that the clothes that you’re wearing are actually helping someone or an organization, you can come back to earth.”
For the launch party, she partnered with Girls Inc. NYC, donating 100% of ticket sales to the community-focused initiative. “I always give 10% of all my proceeds to different organizations that support women or LGBTQ people and I just started looking for local New York City organizations. Once I heard Girls Inc.’s mission and what they’re about, I immediately knew that I wanted to work with them. I volunteered at a career fair and talked to the girls and they’re just all so excited to be there, to talk to people, and this program is making that happen.”
While she’s open to the organic evolution of her brand, she has a few concrete goals for its future: “I obviously have dreams, but I don’t know exactly how it’s all going to pan out. I didn’t think I was going to be where I am right now because of the whole manufacturing process. I thought that was going to take years for me to learn about and get to know, but it’s all happening right now. It’s already happening faster. So within the next few years, I would just love to be in local boutiques in New York, on retail sites that showcase cool and upcoming designers (SSENSE is the main goal), just be able to get my name out there and see more people in my stuff.”
“When I see people in my clothes, it makes me actually want to cry. It’s so beautiful — like that’s something that I created in my head and not only is someone wearing it, but they’re enjoying wearing it. That’s the craziest thing to me. I know the clothes are cute, but someone else thinks they’re cute? That makes me so happy. That’s exactly why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
All photos by ESP: https://esp-camera.pixieset.com/emersonisa/, @espcamera and @avabogdan
Words – Sophie Wang
