It has been 15 years since David Koma launched his namesake label, a powerful milestone, which has left the designer craving for achievement of a distinct form. “I’m so happy with what we’ve achieved,” he mentioned, leafing by racks of clothes in his east London studio. “However I’m at a degree the place I simply wish to concentrate on happiness and to have fun what introduced me right here within the first place.” Designers are particularly susceptible to nostalgia and Koma is not any exception; he’s at present on a mission to rediscover the inventive freedom he skilled as a budding Central Saint Martins graduate. The designer’s resort assortment was among the many most elaborate he’s ever produced.
It started with a sculpture by Isabelle Albuquerque—a 3D-printed rendition of the artist’s exact proportions wrapped in deer pores and skin—that Koma found on-line. “There was a thriller to the work,” he mentioned. “It made me take into consideration the traditional Greek concept of metamorphosis.” A handful of fawn-spotted swimsuits, bodycon clothes, and capes have been a sensual translation of these preternatural fantasies; whereas leather-based saddles have been reinterpreted as belt skirts, and crystallized elaborations clutched the shoulders and hips on fluid jersey robes like talons. Shiny raffia—an alternative to fur—was stitched into aqueous pelts on a nude-sequined skirt, evoking the lustrous mane of an Akhal-Teke horse, and created an abundance of quantity on seashore luggage and assertion coats. The burden of those items would require an equine energy of their very own.
