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He improvised, using curtains made from dead-stock fabric panels and other found items, and added as a focal piece, a driftwood chandelier.Ĭindy Sherman visited and was captivated. His father, a forensic psychiatrist and second-generation Baltic Jewish immigrant, was more keenly drawn to the clean-lined midcentury spareness meant to obliterate the darkness of his European past.Ībout a decade ago, one of those people, the singer and songwriter Jenni Muldaur, asked him to decorate her summer house in Springs, a hamlet just north of East Hampton, lodging him in an unused shed and paying him $9,000, a vast sum to him at the time. The designer grew up in Burlington, Vt., his mother an Irish Catholic psychotherapist with a predilection for old china and handed-down furnishings. Cotton’s “career-long proclivity for exploding clichés and artificial boundaries - between past and present, high and low, intellectual engagement and visceral sensation,” his eclecticism a legacy of his upbringing.
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“In my mind,” he said in his studio last month, “I was that lady, but I was also her gay friends.” “Her gay cohort has sought to uplift her with donated decorations,” Mr. retained the remnants of her racy, haute bohemian past: chinoiserie wallpaper, a skeletal four-poster bed and a leopard-print rug. He provided her with a back story, writing, “As with most of us, some of her hardship was self-inflicted, and some encroached upon her at the cruel insistence of the world.” Her refuge at the top floor of an S.R.O.
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“I don’t have a style,” he likes to insist. Well regarded for his uncontrived, discreetly subversive aesthetic, his style can veer from homespun (think cottagecore with a Ralph Lauren sheen) to coolly austere with strategic bursts of color. He had a string of odd jobs - waiting tables selling decorative gewgaws at John Derian whipping slipcovers, pillows and fake works of art for Domino magazine and designing tabletop ceramics and his own custom furniture - before arriving at a high point in what he considers a journey of self-discovery. Cotton was sitting in his white-lacquered studio on West 26th Street, the space punctuated with Eames chairs, an Italian marquetry desk and vibrantly colorful artworks by friends, and reminisced about his zigzagging ascent. He’s changed me so that I’m much more attuned to quality.” Yuskavage, whose Manhattan apartment he turned into a gray-on-gray haven, a restful backdrop for her art collection. “I’m an artist, but I also think that he’s an artist,” said Ms.