To enter David Koma’s studio is to be swept right into a flurry of anecdotes—many finest left off the file—involving tremendous yachts in Monaco, raves in Dubai, and Tuscan farmhouses teeming with the nice and good of vogue in after-hours mode. Which is why it got here as a shock to listen to that the start line for his spring assortment was not some jet-set playground, however the Surrey Hills in southeast England. Then once more, maybe not: even amid the calm of the countryside, the designer’s ideas veered towards hedonism. Or, as he put it throughout a walkthrough, “a darkish seduction,” “a harmful fairytale,” “sirens,” “marble statues,” and “a couture pageant in a legendary forest.”
Koma realized these fantasies in a lookbook starring a troupe of occasion ladies bursting from the undergrowth in all types of draped night robes and cut-out cocktail numbers. The intention of the gathering, he mentioned, was to discover a stability between his signature geometric traces and the lyricism of the pure world. So whereas clothes might need begun stark and strapless, or with shoulders forged vast, or with angular necklines sliced deep into the navel, every of them dissolved into lengthy, bohemian trains of silk chiffon and satin. “There needed to be a way of ease and a freedom of motion within the garments that felt harmonious with the environment,” he mentioned. “The distinction shouldn’t be overpowering, however dramatic.” That it was: trousers so vast they learn as skirts; neon peach clothes gathered up the leg with bungee cords and ruffed in ostrich feathers; acid-lime minis shredded with silk-knit fringing. “Magnificence is at all times harmful to me,” mentioned Koma. “The risk is what makes it so seductive.”
Isn’t that one in every of nature’s basic legal guidelines? That the prettier one thing seems to be, the deadlier it proves? Effectively, Koma took that precept and ran with it. Tons of of satin florets bloomed throughout waistbands just like the quilled petals of a cactus dahlia; bird-of-paradise leaves—in chrome, black patent leather-based, and hand-embroidered organza—fronted sheer mesh bodysuits; and metallic necklines on diaphanous columns, out-out tops, and ruched minis had been molded into stem-like kinds. There was even a crystal corn husk necklace, which, although extra farmhand than femme fatale, breathed a little bit wit into the gathering. “All of us want some enjoyable in instances like these,” Koma mentioned, in what might have served because the caption to his Fifteenth-anniversary dinner at London Style Week. “It’s all concerning the pleasure of dressing up.”
