Nick Cohen, Master Shewelry-Smith

Nick Cohen is one of those brash mash-up open-format DJs that has the gals swooning and the guys envious of his skills. It all seems easy to an outsider, this modern DJ thing. Serrato technology can put every song you might ever want to hear on a laptop and tell you exactly how to thread those songs together; DJs use this technology to mix in songs from different genres, as they have to constantly find a new way to thrill the crowd. They can carry thousands of songs with them, and the open format set that most clubs now feature can seem repetitive. The great DJs bring smiles to pretty faces as they mix in Dolly Parton, James Brown, or Gang of Four with a song that has been enjoyed so often it needs to be twisted. Those DJs that are successful and have the looks and charisma -- the whole package -- can demand megabucks In a market that has become ultra-international. Tours are no longer the domain of the house heads, as the worldwide table/bottle service phenomena demands DJs that make you sway in place rather than hit a dancefloor. People don’t spend money on dancefloors, but they do at tables.

These days when I design a DJ booth, I must build a central platform for the computer, and I no longer build shelves to hold crates of records. Many DJs see themselves graduating to the production end of music as the addiction of the live set fades with age. Some go on and on like that Energizer bunny, spreading the word to crowds half their age, but many look to capitalize on the connections clubdom affords. Nick Cohen’s exit strategy seems to be in shoes—they’re as coveted as much as his late-night set. It’s wow at first sight

Tell me about the shoe brand.
Well basically the name of the brand is UES, Upper Echelon Shoes. It sort of serves as a double entendre for the fact that my partner and I both grew up on the Upper East Side. We started it officially in 2005 while we were both in school, and I was DJing as well. It was a project that we started and developed around this concept where we took the retro sneaker trend that was happening with Nike Air Force Ones and the Dunks—I was very into those as a kid—and designed our own spinoff of that. The shoe looks similar to an Air Force One, but it’s a midtop.

The thing that sets us apart was the combination of footwear and jewelry. The best way we could express that was to add the 18 karat gold chains as the laces to the shoes. So I got a jeweler, this guy Gabriel Urist, who had gotten recognition through these miniature Nike shoe pendants for necklaces. When we thought of sneaker jewelry, it sort of fit together. So I met with him, and he was a very interesting kid. We had him design a chain for us, and then we went into production. Both of us were relatively young and inexperienced, but we were able to pull off the project and make the shoe. We made about 350 pairs, and we initially ordered the shoes without a proper selling calendar or anything. We just made a list of stores we wanted to be in—Collette in Paris, Fred Segal in Los Angeles, Blue&Cream in New York—and we approached all of these stores, and it was a really different, interesting concept. The price was really high—it was $500 retail —so a lot of people were hesitant to go with it, but we ended getting into a couple of great stores. We didn’t get into Collette. There was also a store in Tokyo, Celux, a really trippy boutique store, we almost got in there, but couldn’t. I think they’re since closed. We broke into H. Lorenzo in LA which was a great store, really great funky clothes and high-end designers and independents.

I still have about 24 pairs left, so we didn’t sell through the whole thing, but we got them in these great stores. What put us on the map was that Puffy was in LA filming a video, and he ended up going into H. Lorenzo, and I get a phone call from my sister who was watching MTV and she told me that she saw Puffy wearing my shoes, and I was like, “Stop fucking with me!” But I went on the internet the next day and saw the clip. Tim was holding the shoe up to the camera, showing off the gold laces. So that sort of put us on the map. The next week I heard he was performing on the BET Awards, and he comes out, the last performance of the show, and then he got up on the stage and he was wearing the shoes. So it was, I’d say, almost the best fun I’ve had in the business to date. Two days later, the Post did a story on the summer’s best sneakers, and it was in the middle; and the front section of the Post is a full page of Puffy performing in the shoes, and then a big blow up of the shoes.