The High Priestess Of The Girlie Girls

Rebecca Hessel Cohen is sitting in her pink, sunlit office, on an antique chair reupholstered in velvety pink fabric. Pink curtains with swooping valences frame the windows, and dozens of pink tulle and sequin dresses drip from racks throughout the space. Pink “just makes me so happy,” the 44-year-old LoveShackFancy founder says, surveying her rose-colored kingdom. “Oh, that was a Kennedy’s,” she blithely mentions as I examine an exquisite little tea set sitting by her desk. (She doesn’t remember which one — maybe Jacqueline?) “I got it at an auction.”

Of course, if you know anything about Hessel Cohen or LoveShackFancy — there’s no line between where one begins and the other ends — then none of this will come as a surprise. LoveShackFancy’s whole deal is unfettered pink opulence. Its ruffled mini skirts, sexy-Edwardian lace dresses, smocked tops with flutter sleeves, and sweet pointelle sweaters — not to mention its flower-filled retail wonderlands — speak to girly girls of all ages: from toddlers to tweens to sorority sisters (it’s huge on #RushTok) to Real Housewives (Kathy Hilton is a fan).

It’s a vision that extends far beyond clothes, with an empire that includes bedding, perfume, luggage, hair accessories, and even LoveShackFancy-branded Stanley cups, one of the company’s many, many collaborations. Nearly everything comes in pink.

“I mean, of course, if it’s up to me, I’d have all pink,” Hessel Cohen says almost wistfully. “But we don’t. We have a lot of black.”

Yet in the LoveShackFancy universe even black is, well, pink. Because to Hessel Cohen, pink is not just a color. Pink is a way of life, a state of mind, a philosophy. It is prettiness and parties and positivity and fun.

You can see it not only in LoveShackFancy’s wares and immersive, fairy-tale-inspired stores, but also in Hessel Cohen’s own over-the-top Instagram and TikTok pages, where her combined 650,000-plus followers obsess over her six-floor West Village brownstone (appointed with a wet bar on every floor, a pink laundry room, and a carriage house in the back, naturally), extravagant vintage hauls (ranging from pastel Chanel suits to Betsey Johnson slip dresses to 2000s-era Bebe), and jaw-droppingly lavish celebrations (including her older daughter’s recent bat mitzvah at the Plaza Hotel, which featured acrobats, a marching band, claw machines, and — per Jewish parenting website Kveller — “a bedazzled basketball hoop”).

Pink is living out your girlhood fantasies even when — especially when — you’re a grown woman with a husband and two kids and an all-consuming, ultra-demanding business with more than 20 (“I think it’s 27”) stores across the United States (plus London). It’s romantic, it’s escapist, and it’s oh so intoxicating.

And it works. The company generates an estimated $100 million in annual revenue, per the business newsletter Puck. This year, it opened a store in Atlanta and has plans for two more in Florida and a second London location. There’s also a possible LoveShackFancy members club in the works, after an April Fools’ post got a little too real.

“I would go to school and switch into these bright-colored fluorescent pink leggings on the bus.”

“I think [people] just love that it is so joyful and happy and optimistic,” Hessel Cohen says. But there’s also good business afoot: She’s long offered a range of price points, for one — $300 minidresses and $1,000 gowns as part of the main line, but also much less expensive pieces through the brand’s collaborations with Victoria’s Secret Pink, Roller Rabbit, and Pottery Barn Kids and Teen. In 2020, LoveShackFancy launched a capsule collection for Target, much of which sold out in a matter of minutes. “It’s just fun,” Hessel Cohen. “We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’re a fashion brand that does high-end and also lower. We follow our own rules.”

I arrive at LoveShackFancy’s Manhattan offices early, and Hessel Cohen has someone warn me that she’s coming from the gym. When she does arrive, she looks like she’s barely broken a sweat, wearing wooden platform shoes, slim white jeans, and a diaphanous ruffled LoveShackFancy blouse. She appears tiny and tanned, and her dark-blond hair falls in beachy waves, though it’s only April. Her bracelets jangle as she sets her capacious logoed Dior tote on the floor. “Oh, thank you,” she says as a young woman hands her an iced coffee. “I need about 10 of these today.”

Hessel Cohen had a late night on Saturday, she explains, and she is evidently still recovering, even though it’s now Monday. Perhaps the occasion was the ballet benefit I’d spied on her Instagram? Hessel Cohen had been honored by the Youth America Grand Prix dance scholarship program and designed a costume and hand-beaded pair of pointe shoes for the occasion. “That was a few days before,” she replies. The culprit was another party, for a friend.

Hessel Cohen’s brand is her “life,” she says, now settled on her pink perch, and vice versa. And her life has always been booked, busy, and fabulous. Even before she launched LoveShackFancy in 2013, she worked “24 hours a day,” she says. “It’s just my personality.”

Back before Hessel added Cohen, she grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in the 1980s and ’90s, attending Nightingale-Bamford, the all-girls prep school that inspired the original Gossip Girl. (“It is veryGossip Girl: steps of the Met, little uniforms,” she says.) As a pre-teen, she was “always kind of a little rebellious and not following the rules.” Her fashion editor mother, Nancy, dressed her in Victorian-inspired Laura Ashley frocks and matching mommy-and-me Ralph Lauren sets. “I wore a lot of floral dresses, whether it was my choice or not,” Hessel Cohen says. “Then I would go to school and switch into these bright-colored fluorescent pink leggings on the bus.”

“I literally gave birth and then had to figure out how to get the clothes into stores.”

Despite these divides, Hessel Cohen idolized Nancy, who worked at Seventeen, and treasured the detailed diaries her mother mailed her from Paris and London. As a teenager, Hessel Cohen was finally deemed old enough to accompany Nancy on her trips to Paris and London for their respective fashion weeks; in between runway shows, Nancy would introduce her to iconic antique markets like Portobello Road and Les Puces. “She was always buying vintage furniture. She was always redecorating,” says Hessel Cohen, who now sources furniture for LoveShackFancy stores from Les Puces. “It’s my absolute favorite place in the world.”

In her youth, Hessel Cohen hadn’t yet reached pink girlie enlightenment. “When I was in high school and college, I definitely wore a lot of black,” she admits. “I would do vintage rocker tees, leather jackets, miniskirts.” But once she had her daughters — Scarlett, now 13, and Stella, now 10 — “my style changed into much more girly, super feminine, pinks, and tulles. I got into that princess world through their eyes.”

Even as a teen, though, Hessel Cohen understood that style was more than the things you happened to wear — fashion held meaning and could communicate narratives and points of view. She wrote her college application essay about her platform shoes, “epic cork platforms that were about this big,” she says, holding her hands about six inches apart. “I literally even wanted to play on the tennis court with them. And so the essay was about how every layer of the platform of the cork was a different part of my personality and a different part of my life.”

After graduating from New York University, Hessel Cohen eventually got a job as an associate fashion editor and then senior fashion and beauty editor at Cosmopolitan. At the time, pop culture was in its indie sleaze era, a far cry from Hessel Cohen’s romantic aesthetic. “I felt like I had these beautiful stories,” she says, but she was frustrated by the way her bosses would ultimately edit and assemble them. “Once they would go into the magazine, it was not something I was proud of. I didn’t like the art direction, and honestly, I didn’t really have a say in the rest of it. And then I designed my bridesmaids dresses while I was there, not thinking anything of it.”

Those bridesmaids dresses — breezy silk halter-neck gowns that she made after failing to find sufficiently ethereal options for her Hamptons wedding to real-estate developer Todd Cohen — were the seed that bloomed into LoveShackFancy. A few weeks after the wedding, she wore one of them herself and fell in love again. It was “the best dress ever to dance in,” she says. Soon, she was selling them at popups in boutiques around the city on the weekends, displaying them on a trellis from her mother’s Bridgehampton house that she kept in the back of the car. “I was like a traveling dress salesman,” she says.

Three years later, she quit Cosmo, had her first child, and formally launched LoveShackFancy with an eight-piece capsule collection. “I literally gave birth and then had to figure out how to get the clothes into stores, and I had no idea about any of that,” she says. She spent “like eight months” on one ruffled miniskirt, “perfecting all the hundreds of miniskirts I’d worn throughout my life. It was very stressful, and I almost gave up. But Todd, he was so supportive. He was like, ‘We’ve gotten this far. Just do it.’”

“I had no idea what Bama Rush was. I saw it and I was like, ‘Someone remove it!’”

For the first several years, LoveShackFancy was mainly a wholesale business, selling to department stores like Shopbop and Bergdorf Goodman. Hessel Cohen found herself with a similar problem to the one she’d faced at Cosmo: She was beholden to how others packaged and put together her work. “Whenever you’re selling to other stores, you don’t really have a say in how they’re merchandising it,” she says. “It’s not, like, the full picture. So, I always just felt discouraged that it wasn’t the ‘world of.’”

Then in 2018, a jewel-box Sag Harbor retail space became available, and she leapt. “It was probably 600 square feet — tiny,” she recalls. She and her mom scurried to England to hunt for antiques to furnish the space, and she nabbed old racks from a Calypso sample sale. “We had no budget,” she says. “And then when we opened the doors, it was packed — packed. All these mothers, daughters, aunts, grandmas, everyone coming in.” Before then, “we hadn’t had any type of direct environment for people to come and see everything as a whole. Once that happened, everyone was like, ‘Wow, now we really get it.’”

In 2021, LoveShackFancy blew up. The company had recently executed the Target collection, and then — seemingly all of a sudden — college girls from the South began posting get-ready-with-me videos on TikTok documenting their LoveShackFancy outfits for sorority rush. “I had no idea what Bama Rush was. I saw it and I was like, ‘Someone remove it!’” she tells me with a glint of knowing self-deprecation. But the younger women in the office convinced her it was great publicity. “So I started watching it, and I was like, ‘OK, I’m kind of intrigued now.’”

Now, she has fully embraced Greek life, redecorating the Tri Delt house at the College of Charleston in full LoveShackFancy regalia and visiting other sororities across the country. The phenomenon has helped LoveShackFancy branch out from the Hamptons-Upper-East-Side mom set to Gen Z party girls and beyond. “They’re such great girls,” Hessel Cohen says. “I love picking their brains. They love LoveShack. They have this great kind of sisterhood, team spirit. It’s really nice.”

And, like Hessel Cohen, they love to party. Indeed, Hessel Cohen is as well known for her flamboyant fêtes as for her clothes. She can’t throw a fashion week presentation, a birthday bash, or a store opening without balloons, confetti, cakes, champagne, and an explosion of flowers. It’s the kind of thing that rankles some critics but has no doubt seduced many others. “It’s an escape,” Hessel Cohen says. “It’s like you’re truly entering the world you see online.”

Celebrations have become the heart of the brand: Hessel Cohen not only puts every brand event on social media, but seemingly every family soiree too. And it’s become a family affair. Todd now primarily works out of LoveShackFancy’s offices, where he helps run the business side of the operation, including new store development and the fragrance arm. “He’s our nose essentially now,” Hessel Cohen says. “He doesn’t have a title, but I call him Mr. Fancy.”

Meanwhile, Scarlett and Stella serve as Hessel Cohen’s muses. She documents their birthdays on social media — breakfast in bed, dozens of balloons, lots of pink — and includes photos of them wearing flower crowns, carrying parasols, and petting bunnies on the brand’s Instagram page.

I ask Hessel Cohen if she ever worries that one day they’ll reject the pink world that she’s so carefully cultivated. Does she think about what happens if one goes goth?

“Oh my God, yes,” she replies. She says that both girls have asked to redecorate their floral fantasy rooms to be a bit more pared back and grown-up. Scarlett, the oldest, is more into frills and ruffles than Stella, who is “definitely more rebellious” and dresses as a black cat for Halloween each year. Recently, Scarlett began complaining about posing for photos for Instagram. “I would never [post] without her permission,” Hessel Cohen says. But even the teen can’t completely resist the glamour that comes from her mom’s business — particularly after videos of her epic bat mitzvah, featuring a sexy winged angel on stilts, a merch stand, a bedazzling station, and the pinkest, sparkliest dance floor ever captured on an iPhone — made her a minicelebrity.

“People stop her on the street,” Hessel Cohen says. “They ask to take photos of her.” Turns out it’s pretty great being the girl with the most cake. “She likes it. ... As long as she looks cool, it’s OK.”