The 1990s fashion scene was dominated by designers like Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren. And Jessica Gersten, who spent nine years working at the latter, was in the thick of this chic world.
In the design studio, no two days were the same. There was garment construction, fine tailoring, and pinning and sculpting fabric to attend to, but she was also pulled into conceptualization, product development, and merchandising, all seen through the lens of a multilayered lifestyle brand.
This background proved critical to Gersten’s next professional move. In 2008, she launched Jessica Gersten Design, her interior design practice in New York. For Gersten, design functions “like a living, breathing organism,” she says, and this evolution prompted her to venture beyond interiors into products. “It’s my way of saying to the public that you can have pieces of my personal vision.”
Take the Ropeira lighting range, which melds macramé ropes with handblown glass. There’s also Sillage, the sinuous sofa she collaborated on with French sculptor Etienne Moyat.
In 2025, Gersten unveiled Lusitano, her inaugural furniture collection, available through New York gallery StudioTwentySeven. Made by artisans in Portugal, it pairs curved forms with horsehair, a material that Gersten hoped would intrigue people and “get them to look twice,” she says. “I wanted to see what kind of interesting, unexpected shapes I could create.” Her standout Amazona lounge chair, for instance, features an adjustable, flowing horsehair detail in back that lends it a distinctive silhouette.
The Cavalo table lamp and the Garanhão lounge chair
Gersten revived her fascination with this material for the recently launched Cavalo, another StudioTwentySeven drop she hatched with Los Angeles artist and designer Jason Koharik. A serendipitous visit to Koharik’s studio revealed lighting experiments with silken horsehair, and Gersten felt a synergy with him.
Comprising six fixtures, Cavalo juxtaposes strands of woven horsehair with hefty solid antique brass and hand-sculpted alabaster. Some of the designs are riffs on the duo’s original, independent works. The Lua pendant reinterprets Koharik’s Corinthian incarnation defined by horsehair descending from a metal tube like a veil; the table lamp mimics the subtle horsehair spine running down Gersten’s Crina dining chair like a mane.
Gersten’s product designs are imbued with a fluid, draping sensibility, a nod to her days centered on clothing. “It’s my signature,” she explains. Gersten has another lighting ensemble underway, and this time around it puts a sheer, gauzy linen front and center. “I think we’re missing that level of softness,” she says.
This article originally appeared in HD’s August 2026 issue.