The new star of US fashion Christopher John Rogers’ bold designs are worn by the likes of Zendaya and Gigi Hadid. Backstage at his New York Fashion Week show, he talks style, hierarchies – and clothes as a “tool for hope”.

Connecting the dots between New York fashion’s past and future might start with some actual dots. They are the size of a bottle bottom and the colour of Skittles sweets – orange, lime, cherry, grape – and hug the edges of jackets, dresses and corsets. Anne Hathaway has worn the dots. Zendaya has worn the dots. Gigi Hadid has worn the dots. At the 2024 Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the dots were beamed into the homes of 23.6 million Americans, sported by the theatre star Cole Escola as they rode a giant flamingo float through Times Square.

The can’t-miss-it motif was designed by 32-year-old Christopher John Rogers, a US fashion designer who counts style icon Diane von Furstenberg as a mentor, and Louisiana as his home state. A graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design, Rogers is fast becoming a new figurehead of US style, thanks to his unique embrace of colour combined with a strong command of tailored, built-to-last elegance.

By making Italian wool trousers in a shimmering rose gold, and cocktail frocks in a bold cartoon red, Rogers and his longtime business partner Christina Ripley are staging a silk-and-merino assault on “quiet luxury“, the de-facto fashion uniform of muted beige cashmere coats and boxy anonymous black handbags made popular by the fictional titans on TV’s Succession and by edgy, understated New York labels like The Row and Khaite.   

“I’m trying to flatten some hierarchies with my designs,” says Rogers backstage at his New York Fashion Week show. Vogue’s longtimeleader Anna Wintour and the actress Keke Palmer sit front row – a sign of their commitment to the designer, considering the show was held in a former fish factory in Brooklyn’s industrial, and remote, Navy Yard. “How can we help more people feel like they belong, but also like it’s okay to stand out? American fashion right now is in a state of flux,” the designer tells the BBC. “We want newness; we want transformation. But we have to be willing to try some fresh approaches. We have to make people excited to get dressed again, to use clothes as a tool for hope… Even if you’re just wearing them to go down the street for coffee.” 

Rogers’s bold but precise jackets and dresses have made the designer a standout seller at agenda-setting boutiques and platforms like Bergdorf Goodman, Neiman Marcus and Net-a-Porter. They have also made the rising fashion star something of an anomaly: along with contemporaries like Sergio Hudson and Brother Vellies’ Aurora James, Rogers is one of just a handful of black US fashion designers sold at major luxury retailers.  

“In a way, I hate that I have to talk about it,” Rogers says. “I mean, I’m honoured to have the responsibility and opportunity of being a black designer right now. But the fact that we, as an industry, are still dealing with that lack of representation is tough sometimes. For me personally, it means that I feel this pressure to be ‘perfect’. But I’m human! I’m not perfect! And I’m on a journey right now of figuring out where pressure ends and excitement begins.” To explore that tension, Rogers calls his new collection “Exhale”, and doubles down on his ethos of jolting black party frocks and brown Wall Street suiting with pops of lilac, rosemary green and flamingo pink. “Some people are never gonna get it,” Rogers shrugs. “But the stores, and certainly the fans, are seeing that a lot of people are.” 

Rogers’s success began seven years ago, when the designer released his first eponymous collection from a tiny Chinatown studio in Manhattan. At first, he waited tables to afford the luxury fabric needed for his 25 looks, but he was quickly hired by the US designer Rosie Assoulin, then by British designer Jonathan Saunders and Von Furstenberg herself. “I really credit my success with extremely hard work, like insanely hard work,” he laughs. “But also, I truly believe that being a nice person and a kind person is the only way to work in fashion. Taking the ego out of it and realising that teamwork is the only way to go, that’s why we’re winning right now.” 

He means that literally. In 2019, Rogers won the prestigious CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund Award, which infused his nascent label with $400,000; in 2021, he beat established industry icons like Marc Jacobs and Gabriela Hearst to the CFDA’s Womenswear Designer of the Year award, and nabbed a prestigious LVMH Prize nomination from the luxury conglomerate in Paris, too.

But industry accolades are only half the fashion puzzle: getting people to buy your stuff is the real goal. On that front, Rogers is making brisk business, too, thanks to his understanding of hybrid-office style norms. During the height of the pandemic, Rogers’s candy-coloured knitwear and spangled sweater dresses became pose-from-home favourites for stars like Gwyneth Paltrow and Rihanna. Last October, he did his first collaboration with J Crew, including 40 pieces for adults and eight for children. In both his main collection and his high street range, he offers extended sizing to include as many potential shoppers as he can.

“Everyone wants an exciting dress that’s actually built to fit their body,” says Nikki Ogunnaike, the editor-in-chief of Marie Claire who has featured Rogers’s designs in the magazine, as well as her shopping newsletter Self Checkout. Ogunnaike says Rogers’s “surprising” success is actually a nod to American shoppers who don’t live in New York or Los Angeles, where US fashion generally plays most of its gambits. “We haven’t really had a black American fashion designer who comes from the American South, and who uses that culture to shape his point of view in such a strong, joyful, accessible way,” she tells the BBC. Rogers’s most obvious reinterpretation of a Southern American motif – a plaid fuchsia dress with a bell-shaped silhouette that looks like a reclaimed, re-trained hoop skirt – is now part of the permanent collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

“What he’s doing with the strong, vibrant, almost defiant colours and the more formal, dressed-up silhouettes is really important from a cultural perspective,” says Ogunnaike. “But that only matters because we actually want to wear the clothes. They’re so fun. So many people look great in them, and wear them in their own way. He wants you to have a great time in your life. He gets it!”

Keke Palmer, the actress who sat on the front row at Rogers’s catwalk show in a white peplum gown and blue feathered coat by the designer, agrees. “It’s glamorous!” she exclaims of her red carpet look as flashbulbs popped off around her. “And current. He’s now.”