Nadia Lee Cohen Talks Her Life in Parties
The photographer and artist shares her personal snapshots and anecdotes from her most fabulous outings.
Some of the world’s most iconic women have entrusted the artist Nadia Lee Cohen with their billion-dollar images. On magazine covers and in editorials, she’s reimagined Kim Kardashian as a 1970s ski bunny, a bespectacled androgyne, and a jockstrap-wearing patriot. She was enlisted by Beyoncé to shoot the teaser clip for Cowboy Carter, and she’s put Rihanna in a nun’s habit and drag queen makeup. But whether she’s photographing celebrities, models, or herself—as she often does—Cohen’s work goes beyond artifice. She aims to capture an imagined character, animated through their belongings and how they choose to present themselves to the world.
Cohen grew up in the English countryside, but not all her points of reference were bucolic. American TV and the bleach blonde mothers from Essex she witnessed dropping their kids off at school heightened her interest in the possibilities of hyperrealistic images. After graduating from the London College of Fashion with an MA in fashion photography, she moved to Los Angeles to explore a twisted version of pop culture. Six years in, she’s living her own version of the American dream, as a frequent guest at galas and a fixture at fashion shows across the world.
“I grew up not really being aware of my appearance until I hit my teens,” says Cohen. “I was a pretty feral kid—unbrushed hair, usually covered in mud. I didn't even know that caring about what you looked like was a thing.”
As a kid, Cohen was always attracted to theatrics, even though she was unaware of the concept of celebrity. For a birthday party, she insisted that all her friends have their faces painted. (Cohen is above, in the brown top.) Something shifted when she started secondary school and noticed the flashy looks of other students’ mothers, inspired by the glamour era of the early 2000s and models such as Katie Price (aka Jordan). “I saw the first examples of fake tans and hair extensions and boob jobs,” she says. “I was fascinated by the sheer effort. There's a thought process behind it, and an intended outcome, and that’s something I respect.”
“I grew up in an old farmhouse that my mom and dad were continually renovating,” says Cohen. “It was beautiful, but there were always piles of scaffolding and bricks everywhere.” A color palette of earth tones, grays, and greens dominates her childhood memories. The major exception was American cartoons: “I loved Tom and Jerry and Ren & Stimpy. I was really excited by the use of primary color, as it was the opposite to anything I saw around me.”
“There's such a stark contrast between the glamorous side of it and the utterly depressing side of it, and it's just a constant butting of heads,” says Cohen of Los Angeles. Here, she’s in a cheap “little sex shop dress” that she wore to Balenciaga’s Met Gala afterparty in 2021, which suddenly fell apart on a street corner.
“I really love Halloween,” says Cohen. “I think about it a lot.” An admirer of director Chris Cunningham, she had long dreamed of re-creating the “Hoochie” from his 1999 video for Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker.” “One year, I came across the perfect face. It was the version with plaits, so I scalped it bald and told my best friend [hairstylist Jake Gallagher], ‘I need a wig, but it can’t be a good wig—it needs to be a shit wig.’ ” She wore it out to a party in Los Angeles, and the next night found herself in New Orleans attending a bash at Jennifer Coolidge’s historic home, this time in a costume inspired by “Hansel and Gretel.”
“I miss him so much,” says Cohen of her late friend Paul Reubens, better known as Pee-wee Herman. “We initially had this online banter where we would chat about certain niche things.” The pair eventually met in person when Reubens came to the opening for Cohen’s “HELLO, My Name Is” show at Jeffrey Deitch gallery. “He had an archive, an entire warehouse of props, random junk, and generally incredible things that he’d collected over the years.” Humor was part of the friendship as well, whether it involved Reubens signing this Polaroid as Beyoncé, from a shoot they did together, or sending her near-hourly text messages with videos and memes on her birthday.
“It was my friend’s Versace party. A Versace-themed party—not an actual Versace party. Bryce [center] is dressed as Steven Meisel.” Makeup artist Sam Visser (right) and photographer Bryce Anderson, along with photographer Charlie Denis and hairstylist Jake Gallagher, are part of Cohen’s stable of trusted collaborators. “It just happens that I’m super close with most of the people I collaborate with; some are my best friends,” says Cohen. “I'm a pretty loyal person. With work, it’s a symbiotic relationship. There’s a shared language where we usually know what the other person is trying to say through the work.”
“I just love the theatrics of fashion. I love the effort. I have such a respect for the dedication and work it takes to be a designer,” says Cohen. For an afterparty for the GQ Men of the Year Awards in 2021, she laced herself up in a crystal-embroidered corset by the Ukrainian brand Frolov and staged an impromptu photo shoot in the bathroom with the help of three strangers.
Cohen had wanted to work with the Spanish actor Rossy de Palma long before she actually met her. Both were in Cannes for an event, but Cohen couldn’t manage to track her down. “I was flying to Spain for a birthday party after Cannes. I sat down on the plane, and on walked Rossy, and she sat right next to me. We chatted for the entire flight. She’s hilarious—she had me in stitches.” After sharing her entire life story, de Palma agreed to narrate one of Cohen’s short films.
“Strangers kept saying, ‘Look, it's Pamela Anderson!’ I was like, ‘No, I'm Lolo Ferrari,’ ” she says, referring to the tragic French icon who once held the Guinness World Record for the most breast enlargement procedures. “She’s one of those figures who pushed themselves to the extreme.” The costume inspiration originally came from leftover props from another project: “I had an abundance of prosthetic boobs in my garage. It’s hot in L.A., and they were rotting. I decided I wasn’t going to waste them, so my special-effects artist applied them and off we went to Kendall’s Halloween party.” Visser (left) and Anderson joined her, dressed as Robert De Niro’s and Sharon Stone’s characters in Casino.
Though she works behind the scenes photographing editorials and campaigns, Cohen is now a regular guest at runway presentations. “I feel like I was brought up in the fashion world way before I did anything outside of it. I feel quite comfortable around fashion people, definitely more than art people, anyway,” she says. Here, she attends Anthony Vaccarello’s fall 2023 show for Saint Laurent in Paris.
Cohen was dressed by the Dsquared2 designers Dean and Dan Caten for the Elton John AIDS Foundation’s 31st annual Academy Awards viewing party, and got ready with the duo in a suite at the Chateau Marmont. She finds attending celebrity-packed events “weirdly normal. Often at those things, what's so interesting is that you're looking at somebody famous, and it doesn't register. It’s almost like they’re an impersonator of that person,” she says.
The original idea for this look she wore to Daniel Roseberry’s fall 2022 Schiaparelli couture show was to paint her face, but while she was working with makeup artist Pat McGrath, they decided to paint her top on instead. “The process took about three hours,” says Cohen. “In my head, it was going to be glamorous, but the reality is I was on a chair in a room full of strangers with my tits out.”
Cohen (center right) hosted a party for her collaboration with the shoe brand Paris Texas at the Chateau Marmont, with friends including (from left) the artist Ariana Papademetropoulos, model Lili Sumner, and designer Zizi Donohoe. The strappy mules Cohen designed were based on a pair she found in a thrift shop when she first moved to Los Angeles. “I had them repaired about seven times, and my friends kept telling me to throw them away as they were just fucking falling apart. So I decided it was an opportunity to rebirth the same pair of shoes.”
Despite her fashion work, Cohen says she sees herself as an artist—then adds, with British self-deprecation, “but it makes me cringe to say that.” In 2022, Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles staged “HELLO, My Name Is,” her first major American solo exhibition. Expanding on work previously published in two monographs, the exhibition focused on Cohen’s gift for creating characters through photography.
The sculpture Carole was inspired by a woman with “Duracell bunny–style energy” she had photographed. “She’s electric, and her presence is so felt when entering a room, I wanted to immortalize her in a way that represented the boldness of her character without having to speak.”
Cohen traveled to the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and took in the premiere of David Cronenberg’s The Shrouds with her friend the director Gaspar Noé. “We're actually quite similar with what we're interested in,” she says. “I was very happy that we were together for that.” Cohen was dressed in a daring sheer number by Saint Laurent on the red carpet—not the most practical choice once she was inside the theater. “It was absolutely arctic in there.”
Cohen was cast opposite action film icon Danny Trejo in the long-gestating indie film Snapshot, but photos of the pair in character caused an online uproar in 2021 when many assumed they were dating in real life. “That’s up there with some of the greatest days of my life,” Cohen says of the shoot.
After one of her books sold out, Cohen and a friend were scouring eBay to see what prices her books were fetching when they stumbled across someone selling a cardboard cutout of the artist. “My friend brought it as a present for me on my birthday. I was so embarrassed about it, so I was trying to hide it.”
Cohen with hairstylist and friend Jake Gallagher.
Cohen recruited her parents and her brother, Ben Cohen, a member of the British comedy duo the Lovely Boys, for a shoot featuring Gucci clothing in 2021. “My parents weren’t familiar with the time it takes to take a photo. They kept saying, ‘Is it done? Is it done?,’ ” Cohen recalls. Her parents are only just recently beginning to understand what exactly she does, but she’s not surprised they raised two children in creative careers. “They're so chill and aren’t really surprised by anything,” she says. “That might be why me and my brother are kind of the way we are. There's no judgment and there's no expectations, and that is a really special way to grow up. I'm grateful for both of them.”
Earlier this year, Cohen decided to rerelease a bootleg version of her 2020 book Women in the style of a Japanese fanzine. “It always looks so much cooler than the original project,” she says of the homespun publications. She traveled to Japan for a signing with her friend and frequent collaborator Charlie Denis. “The openings go by in a flash and are super overwhelming, but I'm so grateful that people show up. I'm always scared no one's going to come.”
Above, she gathers with Denis and Interview editor in chief Mel Ottenberg at another signing, this time in Los Angeles.
