Emily Dawn Long is something of a Pied Piper of Downtown Manhattan, a chaotically charismatic figure who’s got ambition and instinct to burn. Slim, blonde, with a mischievous grin and a pixie bob, to call her a designer would not be quite correct. A maker? A world-builder? Jill-of-all-trades? Whatever she’s doing, it’s working.
In just a few short years, Dawn Long has turned a few viral hits—a kooky conical knit hat, threadbare vintage T-shirts screen-printed with frisky phrases like “Spoiled Boys” or “Take Off Your Clothes”—into an on-the-rise business and IYKYK status among the Dimes Square set. Justin Bieber, Jeremy Allen White, Kaia Gerber, Zendaya, and Pedro Pascal are all fans. She’s collaborated with A24. She’s nominated for both the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and the CFDA Award for Emerging Designer of the Year.
For spring 2027, she released a short film, a lively caper following a series of rings as they’re passed around a group of Lower East Side micro-celebrities. Titled The Crack of Dawn, it featured some of her latest wares, including a dress with a cutout back that dips so low it does, indeed, show the upper gluteal cleft (or “Southern cleavage,” as Dawn Long, who hails from outside Atlanta, calls it).
At her Lower East Side space—which has grown to include a drop-in store, a showroom, an office, and various other nooks and crannies for her creative ventures—she showed the complete collection. “It’s a case study on folds,” she explained. “The ruffle, the pleat, the cockade.” The idea manifested in a simple silk dress and T-shirts screen-printed with a placid image of a folded piece of fabric; the cutouts of those low-cut backless dresses were edged in thick beauty queen ruffles; and some of her pieces featured a traditional cockade (fabric rosettes commonly used as badges) for a touch of folksy charm. A leather jacket had a flounce of red satin-lined frill at the neck and sleeve hem. There was a whiff of the 1980s, she said, in the Hawaiian shirts (the print based on the one Leonardo DiCaprio wears in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and a picture of Bruce Willis), and cropped, garment-dyed, coated-nylon cargo jackets in Miami Vice hues.
Another theme was, of course, the butt crack, which was not only accentuated in those, ahem, cheeky dresses, but in jeans with a keyhole dip at the back of the waistline (another hippie-ish pair features a macramé floral waistband). Her clothes possess the insouciance of youth and an undeniable whiff of sex—but never in a self-serious way. “I can’t not make sexy clothes,” she said. “But with a bit of humor to them.”
Spend some time—and the hours quickly pass by—with Dawn Long, and you get the sense she’s never not in maker mode. “My brain is always firing,” she said, pointing to various side projects: leather cigarette cases and lighter holders, zipped cube bags, square beanbag chairs, and so on. Everywhere you turn there’s a moodboard, a prototype for a new product, a scribble waiting to be turned into the next hot item. It seems exhausting, but it’s not. “I’m having fun!” she said. “I’ve got a really great team, and we’re on it. So why not keep making things?”
