Torishéju Dumi is fresh from winning the Savoir-Faire Prize in this year’s LVMH Prize final. Watching her show, it was clear how the grand roster of LVMH judges had been intrigued by her meticulous but unorthodox application to creating her own techniques and textiles—and by her passionate explanation of what she wants to express through them. “I’m obsessed with pattern cutting and textures,” the London-based designer said while being congratulated after the show. “It’s about this obscure uniform, about deconstructing it and putting it back together in a way that makes sense for myself.”
In her notes, she called it “Mutating tailoring.” The shoulders of denim and man-tailored jackets slid forward to form halter-necks, exposing actual naked shoulders and backs; the top section of menswear pants was fused, further down, with knife-pleated skirts; and dresses and leather skirts seemed to be constructed from the displaced pieces of the necklines of other garments, full of holes.
Another technique, handmade from strips of leather or silk, created raw-seamed corrugated surfaces running vertically through shrunken bomber jackets, skirts, and dresses. Placed on heads were piles of irregularly fused-together caps, coolly slouched across one eye.
Of course, the work of Martin Margiela and Rei Kawakubo precedes Dumi’s by many decades. Yet she comes from a generation of independent designers starting out in a very different, far more stressful climate than the 1980s and ’90s, and her expression of deconstruction wells up from current emotions: “The embodiment of human confusion, the body’s interface with chaos.”
That’s not to say that this talented young woman isn’t also focussed on producing clothes to be worn. One look at the jacket worn by Naomi Campbell and the easy drape of some of her trouser suits said that. In a small collection, she proved she has range—and the support of some influential allies who are willing her on to reach her potential.
