David Koma is going back to his instincts.
“Fashion can be demanding and noisy, I felt the need to reconnect with those feelings and ideas I had when I first started designing,” including a fascination with the body and female form, said Koma.
Everything in his resort collection stems from one basic idea: movement. Prior to designing and draping, he began with a marker—drawing a curved line. That gesture made its way onto many of the clothes, in napa leather forming the top of a few floor-length gowns and a nude mesh top; in stacked silver chain on a black mini dress; and in the slinky leg slits and cut-outs that punctuated the rest of the collection.
From there, a number of influences crept in. Koma thought of Richard Avedon’s photograph of Nastassja Kinski intertwined with a python, shot in 1981, and included column gowns and bomber jackets with snake print stamped onto leather. He drew from the world of dance, specifically, he was inspired by the hidden strength it takes for pole dancers to form their shapes: “to create something that looks effortless requires a lot of discipline,” he said. Similarly, creating sculptural shapes in a resort collection that calls for breeziness and lightness was a technical challenge, requiring layers and structure, and hidden crinoline in some cases.
When shooting the collection, Koma wanted to emphasize another natural part of his design process, that of being struck by a muse. “At the beginning of every collection there’s a character that you envision that keeps you in a loop of fantasy,” he said. For his lookbook, he created an AI visualization of his initial, imagined muse to show his looks in front of a blank backdrop, calling it a “dialogue between the imagination and the image.”
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