Jameel Mohammed and Zoe Bradley Host Fleuriste St-Germain Pop-Up

KHIRY’s founder and co-host of Fleuriste St-Germain Jameel Mohammed opened up to V about his creative process and the exclusive event.

KHIRY’s founder and co-host of Fleuriste St-Germain Jameel Mohammed opened up to V about his creative process and the exclusive event.

St-Germain brought the flavors and culture of 1920s Paris to New York City for the second year in a row with it’s Fleuriste St-Germain pop-up experience.

Hosted this year by Jameel Mohammed, artist and Creative Director of afro-futurist luxury brand KHIRY, and world-renowned paper artist Zoe Mohammed, Fleuriste St-Germain serves as a response to the global flower shortage. Mohammed and Bradley transformed an empty space in NYC’s Soho neighborhood into a multisensory oasis, filled with paper floral arrangements and ever-flowing specialty St-Germain cocktails.

“The conceit of the event came from there being a flower shortage internationally right now,” Mohammed told V Magazine. “I think the idea was like, in the moment when there’s a shortage of this, do you go home and not do anything, or come up with something new and fresh and innovative, and a new way to express creativity?”

At the Thursday night VIP opening of the two-day event, guests like actress AnnaSophia Robb, ballet dancer Isabella Boylston, and Southern Charm star Venita Aspen were treated to a Proust-style conversation between Mohammed and Bradley, moderated by St-Germain’s Earlecia Richelle, on relevant topics like creativity and community, as well as an exclusive jazz performance by Mohammed, his first time preforming live. 

Mohammed is no stranger to tapping into his own creativity. A 2021 finalist for the CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund, he founded KHIRY, a modern luxury jewelry and clothing brand inspired by the African diaspora, while still in school at the University of Pennsylvania. Spurred on after being told that true luxury brands could only be created in Paris, Mohammed channeled his technical and design skills into creating KHIRY, intentionally subverting the conventions of luxury while making statements about the value of Black culture. 

“I think one thing that really attracted the St-Germain team to me is my multidisciplinary practice within the brand,” he said. “Over the past two years, I have really become very insistent about trying to make the brand a little bit less category-specific, and more like a platform for exploration of ideas in different products.” While his sculptural jewelry designs are loved by the likes of Michelle Obama and Amanda Gorman, his venture into clothing is relatively new, having shown at NYFW for the first time last year.

For the pop-up, Mohammed created custom vases to hold Bradley’s arrangements, in addition to sketching the many prints that line the walls of the space. “It’s been a process of expanding my repertoire, because I’ve made sculptures before and I’ve made prints, but not for something as serious as this,” he said. “I’ve made prototypes in the studio, but it’s like, the final show! It’s been a process of creative evolution and also a process of technical evolution.”

As guests mingled and engaged in creative conversation, Mohammed reflected on his growth as an artist, and the parallels between his brand and St-Germain. “As they were explaining the difficulty of making this liquor, that has to be made from thousands of flowers within a very short window of time, I was struck by this insistence, almost, of making things a little difficult for yourself,” he explained.  “I could just make a brand that was about making stuff that’s easy to produce, or that represents the most easy to digest version of politics. But there’s this extra level of like, ‘No, let’s see what we can build with it.'”