They emerged two at a time, from opposite sides of the hall, through doors that creaked. To music that sounded like an incidental soundtrack from a ’90s family-drama movie, each pair of models crossed paths apparently without noticing the overlap, before stopping to pause and look vaguely around in little clearings of parquet littered with autumn leaves and torn strips of print. Kiko Kostadinov said he’d wanted it to feel a bit ad hoc and scrappy, more trade show than show show. He added that the work of Hungarian film director Béla Tarr and New York–based Russian painter Kon Trubkovich (riffing on Malevich) had informed a collection whose desolate complexity made me think of the Polish Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s rip-roaring novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. It was the kind of show that needed to be videoed in Super 8.
If this makes it all sound like heavy going, then apologies: Kostadinov’s freakiness is just very thought through in its functional disjunction. Asics-collab tabi boots inspired by Hungarian army issue were the base of many looks whose apparent spontaneity was highly curated. Aubergine and forest raincoats featured sections of fabric cut diagonally across the back to act as shawls or scarves. Cropped jackets in patches of fabric, checked and plain, were edged in a popper-connected section of triangle flaplets that looked like modernist-sketched feathers. Some wool coats and jackets were decorated with ornate lines of insignia that Kostadinov said were appropriated and then scaled up from 1920s Hungarian bank notes. Military-descended pants were cut with details drawn from sleeves. “When we have an idea, we try to bring it to different places on the body to see how that might work,” said the designer.
Bib-effect piped panels on retro-futuristic tunics, full looks in meandering purple knit cut in with Trubkovich-bold triangles, and others in an irreverent cousin to corduroy cut from ultralight velvet were just a few of the sections. Said Kostadinov: “The whole idea was that I’m a bit sick of people glamorizing this isolated living in the outdoors. Actually, for poorer countries, like in Eastern Europe, it’s not very fun to live in those isolated villages. So a lot of what they wear is like surplus clothes, or they make their own patchwork.”
He added, “You can be in very little and just be fine with it. To just be independent. And do what you have to do.” This was a beguilingly unlike-anything-else collection from one of the most consistently interesting independent designers in Paris.
