Last week, New York DJ and designer Harley Viera-Newton released a collaboration with Champion. The most popular piece in the collection was a hoodie splashed with a cherry print, designed to go with a matching cherry bucket hat and matching cherry short shorts.
Viera-Newton (sister to our own Rio!), started wearing and designing her now-signature cherry-print A-line dresses a few years ago. “They’ve sold out every single time we’ve brought it back,” she says. This is in part thanks to some helpful celebrity endorsements — Selena Gomez wore the dress in a New York Times piece, and Margot Robbie wore it on a press tour for The Legend of Tarzan.
A recent timeline of cherries in the fashion news might start with a popular, now sold-out 2016 Vance tee (a pair of cherries on each boob). Or it could have originated at J. Crew: One writer here at New York remembers seeing a stylish Vogue editor in a cherry-printed dress a few years back, who said, “It’s my best secret: sales rack J.Crew!”
Either way, the print has reemerged. In early 2017, a streetwear brand actually called Cherry launched with hoodies, tees, and reworked Dickies, printed with a messy-looking sketch of two cherries on a stem. Around that time, Chinatown jewelry and purse designer Susan Alexandra launched a cherry-beaded bag that quickly turned into her best seller, bar none.
Which is all kinds of funny, considering cherries are retro as hell: Viera-Newton, for instance, was first inspired by ’40s- and ’50s-era dresses. So, yes, cherries are nostalgic. But they’re also literally sweet, and metaphorically very sexy. You can tie a glossy red maraschino-cherry stem with your tongue, which, well, you just can’t do with a pineapple or a lemon. “Cherries evoke a sort of sexual, Lolita-esque energy that people gravitate to,” Alexandra says. “People always say cherries remind them of their childhood, so I think they represent this uniquely lethal combination of sexuality and innocence.”
The print’s versatility means that it’ll likely stick around, in one form or another. And it’s here to stay on me, literally. Last summer my aunt and I got teeny-tiny cherries tattooed on our rib cages. It’s perfect, as far as meaningless tattoos go: sexy and stupid and silly and classic, all tucked right under my bra strap.
Fun fact: Susan Alexandra’s best-selling cherry bag takes over 300 beads to make.
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