When all the fashion girlies show up wearing toe rings next spring, fingers (or toes) can be pointed at Leandra Medine Cohen. In early June, the Substacker and fashion hound began including images of her feet adorned with three-carat diamond rings into her biweekly newsletter. They were perverse and thrilling, an example of the slightly off-kilter styling moves that make Ms. Cohen one of the most interestingly dressed women in America today.
A few months later, toe rings featured prominently on the runways of Celine and Balenciaga at Paris Fashion Week.
Would those fashion houses credit Ms. Medine Cohen, 36, for their podiatric accessories? Unlikely. But, to close watchers of such things, there was no denying the influence.
Whether or not anyone cares to admit it, Ms. Medine Cohen is a woman who wields immense influence in the fashion world. Her knack for assembling strange outfits dates back to 2010, when she introduced Man Repeller, the blog she began in 2010 as a 21-year-old junior at the New School.
The idea for a large diamond toe ring struck during a conversation between Ms. Medine Cohen and her friend Yael Aflalo, the founder of Reformation who introduced her own line Aflalo last year.
“We were chatting about where the most irreverent, luxurious places to put a diamond are,” Ms. Aflalo said. “That’s how it came up. Two friends, a bit of silliness.” The $2,300 ring, part of Ms. Medine Cohen’s 10-piece collection of lab-grown diamond jewelry for Aflalo, is one of several projects that have made up her life after Man Repeller shuttered in 2020.
Life After Man Repeller
Ms. Medine Cohen suggested meeting at Butterfield Market, an upscale grocery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, for an interview in late August. She often sits outside on a bench while writing her Substack, The Cereal Aisle, which is not about Corn Flakes or grocery shopping but about Ms. Medine Cohen’s obsessive love of clothes.
She named her newsletter The Cereal Aisle because, like a supermarket, Substack has a lot to choose from, and she wanted readers to know they would find only one kind of content from her.
“You don’t go into the cereal aisle looking for yogurt, even though it’s also a breakfast food,” she said.
In this metaphor, cereal is “fashion and some thoughts on life as they relate to clothes,” Ms. Medine Cohen said. Such reasoning needs no further clarification for her 165,000 devoted subscribers. They parse her idiosyncratic language, verbal and visual. They understand what she means by “outfit breakthrough points,” the subject of a recent newsletter she illustrated by wearing a pair of Kat Zarra 14-karat-gold-plated magnetic nipples over a knit tank.
At least six times a month for the past five years, Ms. Medine Cohen has used The Cereal Aisle to publish personal essays, photos of her outfits and her ideas on how to get dressed. Topics range from the pain of childbirth to what makes a good loafer. Each post is filled with a bounty of photos of her, some shot with a selfie timer in her apartment, some shot by a photographer on the street, wearing her sartorial concoctions broken down into shoppable affiliate links. She makes a point to respond to paid subscribers who leave comments or ask questions.
“I live for this stuff,” she signed off her loafer post.
“What I have to give to people is my expression of style and hopefully the ability to figure out their own,” Ms. Medine Cohen said. She was dressed on the tame side of her spectrum in an olive green button-down shirt from LMND; matching micro shorts from the Frankie Shop; brown sandals from Soeur, a French brand she has collaborated with; and a diamond toe ring.
One might expect the girl with the golden nipples to be brash, but Ms. Medine Cohen’s demeanor was measured and earnest, with a sprightly energy. The vocabulary of self-help peppered her conversation. Martha Beck’s “The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self” is a touchstone.
“Loving what you do is actual euphoria,” Ms. Medine Cohen said, noting that she was not in regular therapy but talked to someone from time to time.
The Cereal Aisle is part classic magazine, part conceptual art with Ms. Medine Cohen as the totem for clothes as feelings and communication. “It’s a creative project that I have successfully and authentically figured out how to monetize,” she said.
Repelling and Attracting
It is not for everyone. “She doesn’t have fear around fashion,” said Ruth Chapman, a founder of the now-defunct e-commerce site Matchesfashion.com. She met Ms. Medine Cohen on a shoot for Harper’s Bazaar during the height of Man Repeller, and they became friends, partnering on a few projects for Matches.
“Anything she touched, the items blew out the door,” Ms. Chapman said. “People who read her or see her wearing things feel free to give something a try.”
A clotheshorse of the highest order, Ms. Medine Cohen is not a snob. Many of her favorite items hail from the world of high-priced luxury including the Row, Khaite and Chanel. There’s fine jewelry galore. But there’s also Banana Republic, Gap, Old Navy. She shops on the RealReal and Etsy. She champions small, unknown brands. In the midst of Milan Fashion Week in September, when the fashion world was agog with Gucci and Versace, two of her favorite collections were Boss and Etro. Ms. Medine Cohen said that about a third of her clothes were gifted by brands. The rest she purchases. She rarely borrows clothes.
“I don’t feel like I need to see what’s going on out there to inform my work,” she said. “I actually feel like it muddies the point of view.” She gleans stylistic gestures from civilians walking through the city. She intuits her way to new aesthetic territory, far from algorithmic trends.
If Ms. Medine Cohen is vain, it’s an unconventional sort of vanity. Mouth agape, double chin, hairy arms, errant moles — there’s no angle too awkward to stay in the picture. She prefers to be photographed in motion to capture the texture of the clothes.
Many of Ms. Medine Cohen’s followers, including 1.2 million on Instagram, are fluent in her circuitous and emotional tempo of writing and dressing from Man Repeller. “Man-repelling” was the name Ms. Medine Cohen gave to the practice of wearing trends that women enjoyed but that the average man found repulsive.
A magnetic oddball with a sense of humor, style and a lot of drive, she built the blog into a media company that acted as a gleeful online sorority and cultural digest for millennial women who loved personal style. Ms. Medine Cohen and her cohort were not self-serious or precious. When Man Repeller published a fictional history of ruffles, she described the flourish as “labial foldage on cotton.”
“I wanted to intern there so badly,” said Jeanne Malle, an editor at Air Mail, who discovered Man Repeller as a young teen through her older sister.
For the first five years, Ms. Medine Cohen found Man Repeller empowering and liberating. She grew up in Manhattan, the daughter of Turkish and Iranian immigrants, and attended Ramaz, an Orthodox Jewish day school that required students to wear a modest uniform. “I so viscerally remember the palpable moment of turning 18, going to college and being like: ‘What am I going to look like? I’m going to try it all.’”
Man Repeller became a fashion-industry sensation, befuddling and fascinating legacy media as the blog spoke to a covetable, highly engaged young audience. Luxury brands soon took note, inviting her to sit front row at fashion shows.
She published her first book, “Man Repeller: Seeking Love. Finding Overalls” in 2013, the year after she married Abraham Cohen. She moved her business into a NoHo office and eventually oversaw a staff of 18. There were Man Repeller pop-ups, a podcast and partnerships with megabrands like J. Crew, Chanel and PayPal. In 2014, New York Magazine profiled Ms. Medine Cohen, who laid out her ambitions to make Man Repeller bigger than her.
“I can do this,” she said at the time. “I’m going to do this. I can be a media giant.”
‘It’s Just Clothes’
It turned out that was not in the cards. In the summer of 2020, she stepped down from her role at Man Repeller after being swept up in the girl boss soft-cancellation spree that tore through fashion and media against the backdrop of Covid-19 layoffs, loss of revenue and Black Lives Matter social unrest. In October 2020, Ms. Medine Cohen announced that Man Repeller was shutting down entirely because of financial constraints.
“The circumstances under which it happened were not ideal,” she said. “But I was ready for a change.”
For a few years, Ms. Medine Cohen had been struggling with her role at the company she founded. She was beholden to the business, the employees and the audience, yet plagued by the feeling that Man Repeller was “chronically not it,” she said. By that time, she had two toddlers, twin girls. A third daughter was born last year.
“I couldn’t admit to myself that I didn’t want to run a media company,” she said. “I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I could respect myself and also just wear outfits and talk about the outfits and how I navigate the world through clothes.”
Ms. Medine Cohen refers to the interim between leaving Man Repeller and introducing The Cereal Aisle as “the bridge.” She was lost. There were real bouts of sadness and confusion. “My husband would get home from work and I’d be on the floor under the stove crying, like, ‘How did this become my life?’” she said. Unsure if she still wanted to write about fashion, write at all or stay home with her children, she followed the advice of a friend: “Go where it’s warm.”
That led to her closet. At first, Ms. Medine Cohen was cynical. “I’d be like: ‘It’s just clothes. Why am I acting like this is more than clothes?’” she said. But putting together an outfit lifted the spirits. “Maybe it looks stupid, but it feels good,” she said. “I’m having fun.” It felt like progress. She started writing.
Ms. Medine Cohen was introduced to Substack by her husband. Her first post, in September 2020, was titled “Moving Home,” a personal essay reflecting on confusion about luck, privilege and self-awareness that now reads like relic of a more “woke” era. At the time, Substack was not a home for fashion writers.
“She was actually the first,” said Sophia Efthimiatou, the head of writer relations and events at Substack. In January 2021, Ms. Medine Cohen officially introduced The Cereal Aisle, laying out her plan to cover style tips, garment breakdowns and thoughts on parenting. She was seeking feedback. She missed engaging with an audience.
“It was a no man’s land in the beginning,” she said. “It was a dead zone. I was like, ‘Is anyone reading this?’”
Substack has more than 50,000 publishers making money across its platform. It does not break out numbers by category, but, Ms. Efthimiatou said, “Leandra effectively launched the fashion cohort on Substack.” A LiveBoard ranks the newsletters according to subscriber-generated revenue. Ms. Medine Cohen is always in the top five in Substack’s fashion and beauty category.
As for her future, “there is no strategy,” Ms. Medine Cohen said. Maybe she’ll write another book. Maybe she’ll have another baby. Maybe she’ll start her own brand. The Aflalo jewelry is manufactured by Mark Henry, her family’s jewelry company. Café Leandra is a website that is home to her writing, merch shoppable through affiliate links and her collaborations. Earlier this month, a range of colorful tights designed with Swedish Stockings was released.
“It hasn’t really turned into anything,” she said of her website. But it might.
Ms. Medine Cohen is approaching all her projects the way she does The Cereal Aisle. “When I started it,” she said, “I was, like: ‘I’m 35 years old. I just changed into 35 outfits and spent two hours taking pictures of myself in my living room. Then I made my kids dinner.’ What kept me going was the recognition that it was fun and it could be over tomorrow if I wanted it to be.”
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