Lynn Yaeger's closet, with Leandra Medine Cohen

In our latest video series, Closet Bazaar, RESEE and Leandra Medine Cohen invite you to step into the wardrobes of New York’s most iconic sartorialists, who share the stories behind some of their most cherished—and defining—pieces.

“Welcome to Museum de Lynn,” Leandra Medine Cohen says in the first episode of our new video series, Closet Bazaar. Today, Cohen is standing in the downtown Manhattan apartment of Lynn Yaeger, the eminent fashion journalist and Vogue contributor, who’s at once recognizable for her signature tomato-red Louise Brooks hair, mulberry-painted Cupid’s bow lips, and voluminous layers of lace, tulle, and crinoline.

Such a more-is-more display is not merely Fashion Week fodder, but rather a life-long dedication to her indomitable, larger-than-life sense of style. “This kind of silhouette has always appealed to me,” says Yaeger, who remembers once asking her mother for what she refers to as an angel-like top. “[My mom] said, ‘Oh no, that looks like a maternity blouse, and I thought, ‘That’s what I want.’”

These days, she’s often found in spacious, otherworldly designs—both old and new—from the likes of Molly Goddard, Simone Rocha, and Comme des Garçons, the last of which she first began collecting—despite the steep price tag—decades ago at Barneys’s original 17th Street store. “I couldn’t say I needed a loan for a dress, so I told the credit union at the Village Voice [where she began working in the 1980s] that I needed a new refrigerator and my landlord wouldn’t give me one,” she recalls.

Ultimately, Yaeger did secure that dress; more recently, additional Rei Kawakubo archival treasures—a diamond-brooch evening cape; a 1996 flocked velvet floral jacket—that she has tracked down on the secondhand market have joined what may very well be the world’s most whimsical wardrobe.

As for how she knows when to press purchase on a vintage find? “It’s just a leap of faith,” she says. “It’s just a leap in the dark.”