David Koma is all about his crew. Through his womenswear he’s already built a solid following of enthusiastic subscribers to his graphic brand of powerful evening wear. Now, after 15 years, he’s trying to broaden his base by providing clothes that his male soulmates will want to get into, too. At a preview, he said: “A key challenge for me was to have the depth and variety in the collection really resonate with the wide group of friends that I have across different ages, professions and nationalities, and everything that they do in their life.”
Koma imposed a loose division between offstage and onstage to demarcate daywear and night. Both subsets were strongly influenced by dance, specifically Jiří Kylián’s Sarabande, a piece which the designer said “contains this amazing combination of classic ballet and more contemporary dance.” T-shirts came printed with silhouetted photos showing the dance partner of a senior member of Koma’s design team. The collection blended humor and fantasy through various pieces including inky black boxer-short shorts (with false flies) spackled with crystals and black leather brief-bloomers. There were vests in embroidered crystal mesh, a material carried over from women’s resort, and a shirt in baby deerskin that prefigured (said Koma) his next womenswear mainline collection. Fabulous bulky bags in black or scarlet marabou also doubled handily as extreme headpieces.
Offstage, there were tough work pants and blazers in two-tone cracked leather, dark denims, and a black leather stevedore’s jacket. Hoodies and T-shirts came printed with the black on black outline of a faun. Shoes and boots had raised chisel toes: romper stompers.
Back onstage a crinkle-finish trench in a treated, papery cotton was dramatically tassled by a long loop of marabou threaded through one epaulet: simultaneously ceremonial military and industrial camp. More marabou fringing was applied to a lilac crystal-spotted button up, while a black satin blazer was shrouded with a shinily flexible haze of lurex thread. A T-shirt was embedded with the crystal outline of a corseted torso; black leather basketball shorts came bisected at one leg by a horizontal double line of stainless steel rivets: just as Koma often plays hard lines against softness and contour in the female form he was applying different topographies against the male in order to depict an abstracted sensual athleticism.
