ROUTE • We've partnered with Route to offer Green Shipping Protection at checkout to protect your order and the planet.

  • Register / Login
  • Currency
  • Search

    • Synesthesia

    About

     About

    To track Jonathan Cohen’s collection archive is to track his love of and curiosity about music and its impact on community, memories, and himself. This season, Cohen approached his deep connection with music from a fresh angle: science and the five senses. Enter Synesthesia – a little-known neurological hypersensation experienced by some artists in which one of the five senses becomes cross wired with another which informed this season’s collection theme. 

    Cohen dove deep into the world of Synesthesia, researching its many variations, but as he considered his own impassioned relationship with both music and color, Chromesthesia - a type of sound-to-color Synesthesia in which people with the hypersensation not only hear, but see  music - stood out. 

    In one particular reading a woman described her experience at the orchestra. As the music began the woman was hit with rays of white light that slowly transitioned into pinks, followed by darker reddish hues which transcended into many shades of blue until the crescendo hit and a beaming supernova of colors exploded in front of her eyes. Finally, the concert concluded and she sat surrounded by darkness. Inspired by this vivid account, Cohen began designing his Spring/Summer 2025 collection. 

    In this season’s floral prints, Cohen tried to encapsulate this color journey, creating three distinct prints that represent her experience at the orchestra.

     

  • Abstract Anemone: Starting where the woman at the concert began with a ray of white light that bleeds into pinks and reds, Cohen digitally manipulated layers of pink and red anemones on a light background for his first print
  • Orchid Scatter Print: Continuing along with the woman’s experience, this print explores an array of floral blues designed to look like they are exploding through a speaker at a concert
  • Anemones Supernova: Underscoring Cohen’s vision of a floral explosion resulting from a collision between flowers and booming sound waves – with further fragmented anemones seen in the pattern and embroidery made of leftover scraps from past collection scattered to look like debris, the third print attempts to depict the supernova the woman saw as the music rang loudly in the concert hall and then slowly bleeds into the blackness

    •  

    The collection’s additional two color stories approach the woman’s orchestral Synesthesia experience from a macro perspective. Both the colorful tweed and the diagonal tie dyes are designed with colors that bleed into one another similarly to how the woman described the colors in front of her eyes warping and blending from one to the next as the musical notes change.

    Jonathan Cohen’s connection to music and color has always informed his artistic direction, and his Spring/Summer 2025 Collection: Synesthesia, is the ultimate  merging of these two parts of himself through the stories of others' sound and color experiences — more specifically, through the experiences of those with Chromesthesia. 

    Read More