When he isn’t busy giving his friends homemade tattoos using a needle and ink and the stick-and-poke technique more familiar to jailbirds than designers; or D.J.’ing at a weekly Smiths and Morrissey ’80s night at the downtown club Sway; or playing his cello; or slouching with old friends like Chloë Sevigny; or bicycling around town with his jet black asymmetrical fringe blowing across his supersize Ari O glasses, Benjamin Cho is pretty busy at his day job being a strangely brilliant, deeply idiosyncratic fashion designer, one known in the business for a certain rare distinction.
What is that? Well, his publicity handout refers to his staunchly original views. That is one way of saying that, in a generational field of highly professional but generally uninspiring fashion personalities, Ben Cho is conspicuous for his iconoclasm and cool.
You might claim that he has not sold out, were it not that selling out carries with it a kind of vague Warholian hipness. Rather, it is that, given the chance (and he has had many in his 30 years) to become one of the anointed young designers, to hop on the Council of Fashion Designers of America bandwagon, to collect silly fashion game-show prizes, he prefers to stay stubbornly indie.
“New York fashion has really become synonymous with clothes that are like chic picnic dresses,” he said. “I think people are sick of everything basic and safe.”
Fashion, as is well known, has allowed itself to become commercially wary and domesticated. Even the approved eccentrics get flak. “When I look at blogs and these people criticizing Hussein Chalayan’s electronic dress are saying, ‘But who is going to wear that?’ like they’re so insulted he had this brilliant idea,” Mr. Cho said, “I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why is that even a question?’ ”
Mr. Cho, who will show his spring collection tomorrow, is not likely to do any deals with Target. His clothes, which are slightly hippie-organic, waver between hardness and softness, between the eminently practical and the surreal. If Elsa Schiaparelli’s car smacked into Vivienne Westwood’s, the ambulance crew would find Ben Cho. Although this is meant as a compliment, it may help explain why he is not likely to get picked up soon by Nordstrom or Bloomingdale’s any time soon.
“Well, there’s Colette,” he said the other day, referring to the Paris boutique that is among his handful of hard-core loyalists. “There are a couple of others that carry me, but I’m not totally sure,” added Mr. Cho, who led a peripatetic childhood as the son of the opera singer Young-Ae Kim and a physicist who worked for NASA, and who grew up in San Jose, Calif., and yet now stands for more or less everything that once made downtown New York an exciting place to live.
This was the New York of pre-Soho House vintage, of course. This was before fashion design became a profession whose risk quotient is roughly equivalent to deciding to become a C.P.A.
“The truth is I don’t want to sell to a million stores,” Mr. Cho said. “I don’t want to put myself out there making these chic stupid dresses.”
The biggest career error he ever made, he said, came during the season after Vogue discovered him and when his designs started appearing in European magazines like Purple and Self Service. “Suddenly, everyone, and I mean everyone, said, ‘Now you have to do conventional pieces, you have to do a simple sweater and a pant,’ and I had never sold pants, and so, honestly, it really threw me off.” He paused. “No one wants a simple pant from me.”
As it turned out, what they want is the zigzag sequin dress that even close friends told him was a little too $1.98 hooker, and that a group of Vogue editors implored him to destroy before showing Anna Wintour his line. “Even my friend Fun Fun, who understands my hard-core ideas, laughed and said I was going too far with that dress,” he said.
“But by now I trust my instincts, and I kept it in. And that, of course, was the dress Vogue chose to run as a big picture.”
And so, when the Rodarte girls, two former unknowns from Pasadena whose first collection was a galloping success, asked Mr. Cho for some career advice, he was quick to offer this wisdom: “Don’t let them make you expand too fast. Don’t let them force you to make conventional pieces. Everyone is always telling you to make things more basic. Protect yourself from that.”
If experience has shown him anything, the market secretly hungers for the unruly. “There’s always room for wild clothes,” he said. “The stuff they tell you to weed out.”
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