Kohan has cultivated a circle of influential LA supporters including actor Tracee Ellis Ross, fashion advisor Katherine Ross Govan, influencer and Phlur founder Chriselle Lim, celebrity stylists Mariel Haenn and Erica Cloud, and costume designer Negar Ali Kline. Friends bring friends, stylists bring clients, and customers introduce more customers.
“Desiree has an unerring eye. She doesn’t follow trends. She has a distinct point of view all her own. She has an innate ability to recognize what is beautiful, unexpected, and enduring. In a city like Los Angeles, where the shopping landscape can often feel driven by trends, her perspective is truly unique. She brings a highly personal sensibility to the way she curates, always championing emerging designers and creating a space where people who love fashion go to feel inspired,” says Ali Kline, costume designer for Netflix’s Nobody Wants This. “I always go into [Des Kohan] to pull for projects, when I am looking for something a bit different and interesting.”
Scaling discovery
The community eventually outgrew Des Kohan’s original 850-square-foot Mid-Wilshire home, which was adjacent to her family’s beauty supply store. So, in 2021, Kohan bought a 5,000-square-foot mid-century building on Fairfax Avenue, with a 1,300-square-foot retail space and three apartments above, marking a significant bet on bricks-and-mortar at a moment when other influential independent boutiques were disappearing.
But the larger footprint didn’t mean abandoning the sense of discovery that had defined the store from the beginning.
“We’re off the beaten path by design,” Kohan says of her salon-style space with a large picture window letting the LA light in, a pair of 1940s original Frank Lloyd Wright plywood chairs for lounging, and a vintage Roche Bobois red travertine dining table where she often entertains clients over lunch.
When the LA native opened Des Kohan in 2005, Barneys New York and the other department stores were formidable competitors. She decided that having a good eye wasn’t enough to attract customers, and that 80% of the store would be exclusive, whether through hard-to-find designers or pieces reworked specifically for her.
That was rare at the time, she says, explaining that the first part of her career in fashion, while living in Milan working as a trend forecaster for Prada and Louis Vuitton among others, helped her build working relationships with brands that eased her entry into retail. Kohan works with designers who don’t impose minimums on the store, sometimes only buying three or four looks that she then styles with other collections. “We follow our guts and never follow the rules,” Kohan says. “But there are seasons where we buy three department store orders’ worth and reorder multiple times. We have a good sense of what is expected of us as a highly curated, edited store.”
Her approach to buying, which ironically she calls “anti-trend”, veers toward sculptural and conceptual but always through the lens of timeless wearability. For fall, she is stocking sleeveless double wool vests with oversized pockets in military green by Dusan’s Dusan Paunovic, which they developed together as a West Coast take on the designer’s timeless outerwear. Sculptural cotton rib knit T-shirts and knotted lightweight knit dresses by Christian Wijnants were similarly tailored to warmer weather after the Antwerp designer visited the Des Kohan store and received feedback from customers about their needs. Meanwhile, Ashlyn’s layered maxi-skirt and cardigan with a molded peplum, which can be worn together as a soft-but-sophisticated set, are arriving in a tan color made exclusively for the store.
