David Koma had just returned from Stromboli, where he’d been on set shooting a Blumarine lookbook, when it was time to present his own resort collection in London. Lace, pearls, and sugar-rush pastels—signatures more closely linked to Blumarine than to the graphic, femme-fatale-coded vision of his namesake womenswear—cooed from the rails of his Shoreditch studio. The influence was fun to speculate on, but Koma was sure to dismiss any direct comparisons between his respective brands. “I always swing between extremes,” he explained. “Last season was tough, whereas this time, I wanted to see how soft I could take it while still making the clothes feel strong and empowering to women. I wanted to use femininity as a sort of weapon.”
Koma set forth on his mission with a rewatch of the hit series Mad Men—the 1960s remain his favorite decade in fashion—and found inspiration in its glamorous female leads, who, beneath their sweet floral-print dresses, were often more hardcore, and hardened, than their male counterparts. He sought to channel that tension into clothes where flowers became a kind of battledress: chrome stems clutching bikini bottoms and tracing babydoll dress cutouts; three-dimensional silk roses puncturing nude-illusion inserts on draped and deconstructed satin gowns. Elsewhere, circles of studded denim and bonded lace were hand-appliquéd across bralettes, pant sets, and boudoir-ish minidresses to form barbed clusters. The designer’s notes might well have read: “You can look, but you can’t touch.”
It would, of course, be a struggle to imagine Betty Draper and her peers in looks as revealing as these, but fashion is in a different place now. For example: Koma transformed the notion of tweed two-pieces into sequin-scattered cocktail dresses, and twinsets and pearls into pearl-encrusted hotpants in buttercup yellows and powdery lilacs. This lighter-than-usual palette was informed by the American pop artist Mel Ramos, whose 2014 lithograph Maidenform Molly—in which a striped figure is depicted with an absent square at her bust—influenced this season’s hazard-tape leather skirts and T-shirt dresses with stark holes in the torso that, in Koma’s words, “mimicked a television.” The designer has spent a lot of time replaying the past, but his next task will be to consider his own: he’s spent 15 years in the business, and should celebrate the milestone away from a screen—that includes a viewfinder in Stromboli.
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