MANDY COON & SALLY LA POINTE
New York Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2012 · September 2011 · Then and now
Mandy CoonandSally LaPointe Two downtown designers with a hard edge, one season in 2011, and the very different places they took it.
Mandy Coon
Mandy Coon is considered a hard-edge designer since her debut, but we felt a lighter touch with this collection. There was some white (one of my favorite looks), lots of asymmetric hemlines, leather, and sharply cut satin dresses.
Coon's own description of her habit is simple: I always want to wear black.
She told Vogue backstage that adding colour is always a challenge for her, so this season she added white instead, a colour in its own right, as she put it. The collection drew on crystal formations and the otherworldly mixed-media sculpture of the artist David Altmejd.
Every piece had a name, like tracks on an album. Her friend Jamie Bochert opened the show in a cobalt "Rong Hands" top and a "Smokescreen" skirt that set leather against fluttering sheets of accordion-pleated chiffon, and closed it in the all-white "Spellbound." In between came the "I Feel Voxish" leather culottes with striated silk panels and "Helter Skelter" pants with cutouts and buckles running up the shin.
Before 2011
Coon grew up in Katy, Texas, outside Houston, and was scouted as a model at a local mall. Fashion led her to FIT in New York to study couture sewing and tailoring, and then to an apprenticeship with the Danish designer Camilla Staerk, who pushed her to launch her own label. Along the way she DJed, as one half of Two Mandy DJs, and was a member of the electroclash girl group W.I.T.
Her first New York Fashion Week presentation put models against the walls of a Soho gallery, posing and grasping at its edges. Her own look, a jet-black geometric cut on a natural blonde, became a reference point of its own; it is said to have inspired similar hair on Yves Saint Laurent's Fall 2008 runway after she appeared in LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great" video. Her rule for the clothes was personal from the start: I design clothes that I want to wear.
Music never left the work. Read her designer playlist for Rolling Stone.
Sally LaPointe
Sally LaPointe was born and raised in Massachusetts, graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Apparel Design, and moved to New York to launch her collection. She is adored by Lady Gaga and her stylist Nicola Formichetti, and finds inspiration in "futurism and science fiction." Spring/Summer 2012, however, was inspired by the Renwick Ruins, the abandoned smallpox hospital on Roosevelt Island, wanting to give off a feeling of "haunted romanticism." My favorite photographer and video director, Floria Sigismondi, instantly comes to mind. The collection included many gray geometric pieces, always with a strong shoulder, and several neon yellow pieces.
Before 2011
LaPointe grew up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and trained first as a painter at the Acorn Gallery School of Art under the artist Debra Highberger. In a 2026 hometown profile by Sophia Harris, Highberger remembered a student who dressed only for herself. LaPointe only found fashion as her medium in RISD's apparel program, where her desk sat next to Sarah Adelson's. After graduating in 2006, the two moved to New York and, by 2010, had launched the label together, LaPointe on the creative side and Adelson on operations.
Six months later
For Fall 2012, LaPointe softened her gothic, angular style with a collection inspired by Kafka's The Metamorphosis: more colour and pattern than her usual all-black, flowing gowns with asymmetric hems, laser-cut lace, a custom metamorphosis print and a winged silhouette, all worn with pale skin and blood-red lips.
Fifteen years on
In 2011 they looked like neighbours: dark palettes, leather and structure, the same downtown crowd. What happened next is two different answers to the same question about how to grow an edge.
LaPointe went from gray to every colour
The label renamed itself LAPOINTE in 2020 and is now known for bold, head-to-toe monochrome looks in saturated colour. The neon yellow pieces of 2011 look, in hindsight, like an early clue. LaPointe joined the CFDA in 2015, the year she won the FGI Rising Star Award, and was named to Forbes 30 Under 30.
Her clothes have been worn by Beyoncé, Rihanna, Oprah Winfrey, Zendaya and Jill Biden, and are sold at Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue and Harrods. Adelson is still her business partner. And LaPointe's own uniform, she has said, is head-to-toe black.
Coon went from the runway to the bunny
Coon's floppy-eared bunny bag, first shown in fall 2010, outlived the runway era. It became a cult piece carried by Alexa Chung and Zooey Deschanel, and a larger version made with Dominic Louis turned up on Rihanna's Instagram. The bag, the "Ginny" in her current line, led her into a full accessories collection built around leather.
She won the Ecco Domani Fashion Foundation Award in 2011. Today, according to her own bio, she lives on California's Central Coast, where the landscape has moved her work toward lifestyle pieces, still with the humour that named a pair of trousers "Helter Skelter." Follow her at @mandycoon.
The week itself
When these collections showed, New York Fashion Week's main tents had been at Lincoln Center for only a year, and Instagram was less than a year old. Earlier in 2011, both designers were on the official February calendar: LaPointe at 548 West 22nd Street on a Friday night, Coon in Lincoln Center's Box the next afternoon. Shows were made for editors and buyers in the room; the pictures reached everyone else days later.
Today a show is built for phones as much as for the front row, streamed live and cut into short video before the last look has walked. Coverage like Nylon's charts that shift. Looking back at a season like this one, the striking thing is how much of it was made simply for the people who were there.
Quick answers
What inspired Mandy Coon's Spring/Summer 2012 collection?
Crystal formations and the mixed-media sculpture of artist David Altmejd. Coon, known for black, added far more white than usual, alongside leather and accordion-pleated chiffon.
What inspired Sally LaPointe's Spring/Summer 2012 collection?
The Renwick Smallpox Hospital ruins on Roosevelt Island, for a mood she called "haunted romanticism": gray geometric pieces with strong shoulders, plus a few neon yellow looks.
Is Sally LaPointe now LAPOINTE?
Yes. She founded the label in New York in 2010 with RISD classmate Sarah Adelson and renamed it LAPOINTE in 2020. It is now known for bold, colour-driven monochrome dressing.
What is Mandy Coon known for?
Leather-driven, edgy womenswear with a sense of humour, and her floppy-eared bunny bag, which debuted in fall 2010 and was carried by Alexa Chung, Zooey Deschanel and Rihanna.
- Vogue — Mandy Coon Spring 2012 Ready-to-Wear, by Brittany Adams
- Mandy Coon — Spring/Summer 2012
- Wikipedia — Mandy Coon
- Wonderland — New York Calling: Mandy Coon (2011)
- W Magazine — Mandy Coon x Dominic Louis bunny backpack
- CFDA Runway360 — LAPOINTE
- LAPOINTE — About the brand
- Coveteur — Sally LaPointe's closet
- Sophia Harris — "She took the runway to New York" (June 2026)
- Nylon — how New York Fashion Week has changed
