The Next Creative Directors: Charlie Kohn

Charlie Kohn
21 years old
Portland, OR
Third-year BFA at Parsons School of Design

Jane Lewis: How would you define your design ethos? 

Charlie Kohn: It changes all the time. In The Soul of Man Under Socialism by Oscar Wilde, he talked about the relationship between the art, the artist, and the public. He says that art shouldn't conform to the public's opinion. The good qualities in art are always the individual aspects, and so if I wasn't making something really different, then I'm just making something bad. I was pretty rigid about that. For a while I was really trying to make things that were really unique. I’m not very concerned with that anymore. I'm not going to sacrifice something that's good for the sake of making something that's purely different. I don't want to make something abstract just for the sake of making something abstract. 

I just finished The Principles of Art by R.G. Collingwood. What's essential is to understand the difference between craft and art. With craft, you already know what you're going to express. Art, you don't know until you make it, or until you've expressed it. Now, the questions I ask before I make clothes, I don't want them to be answered before [it’s done]. [My semester abroad at] Central Saint Martins really changed things. I realized I was trying to find answers before I even made anything. 

J: You were overthinking, but as art. 

C: Yes. It needs to evolve as you're doing it, which is difficult in fashion. In painting, you might be able to figure it out as you go. It can be really spontaneous. Fashion starts as an idea, then a sketch, iteration, flat, pattern, toile, pattern again, and then final. Spontaneity is kind of difficult. It's possible to make half of something, and then close your eyes and wonder in what ways it could get better, or try to figure out what you want to express. I'm not seamless at this. I’m just trying.

J: Do you have a favorite artist?

C: I've been getting a bunch of photo books recently because I'm collecting research for my pre-thesis project. This woman who shoots portraits, Rineke Dijkstra, I think she's amazing. There's another photographer that I really love, Manfred Williams. I just got his book, and it's too good.

J: What do you love about it? 

C: I like the colors. His greens are like blues. They're so saturated and deep. He takes flash photos in the daytime that are just so good.

J: If you could design a uniform for any profession, what would it be and what would it look like? 

C: That's such a fun question. The year before I went to college, when kids would ask me where I was going to school, I'd say I was going to Parsons for dishwasher design, because I worked as a dishwasher [in Portland]. So that's what I’d make, a dishwasher’s uniform.

J: Do you see yourself having your own brand or working in an atelier, or…?

C: The “great” designers follow that path. They go to college—a lot of them, not all of them—and then work beneath a really great designer. From that experience, they start their own brand later in life. That sounds like a cool route, but I’m not going to start a brand anytime soon. After Parsons, if I'm not continuing education, working in an atelier of some sort would be prime. It's also really difficult to do. 

J: What's a piece of media that has had a really profound impact on you?

C: Probably literature. Almost every project I've done has started with a passage from a book or a poem. There's been a lot of Richard Powers. Recently, a lot of [Henry David] Thoreau, because I read Walden last year. Oscar Wilde, too. One of my close friends is super into poetry. He just has tons of poems in his head so he refers me to poets and passages.