Silence!

Film "Ghosts in Architecture" for SILENT S/S 11 by Malcolm Pate

The label name may want to tread quietly in is tracks but the celebration made some noise.  I was in Berlin for a video presentation of S/S 10 Damir Domir's SILENT line on a rooftop where I fell in love with the city, ate too much Haagan Daz and gaily said something like "Wow… this is a DREAM!".  

I have to stop myself from falling into fashion journalism's lazy trap of calling SILENT a diffusion line.  To diffuse something, it has to have elements of the thing it is diffusing from and essentially, SILENT is not directly conceived from Damir Doma's mainline collection which has also recently expanded into womenswear.  The Croatian-born, German-educated and Antwerp-experienced designer has built a strong aesthetic with his menswear in a relatively short period of time, with his sensibility for richly ethereal designs that have added questions to the boundaries of contemporary menswear that always seem to incorporate some personal sentiments from the designer himself.  With SILENT, it's a lot simpler and the richness is stripped back to plainly reveal clothes that you want to shrug into.  There's some Rick Owens DRKSHDW qualities to some of the pieces but with a greater consideration for fabrications and how basics can be shifted to something interesting…

Ah…interesting basics.  That old chestnut.  I'm personally at a point where I'll fork out the extra lot for basics
that will work harder – this isn't a hard and fast rule – I also have
cheap tees that have also gone the extra mile.  But given my experience with
Jens Laugesen white shirts and vintage Jil Sander jumpers being all
overworn, used and abused has taught me some sensible (not often you hear that around here…) values about the oft-used term of 'basics'.  I can only really be convinced by the touching and the pricing and see how they weigh up next to each other.  Around the ¬£200 and under mark, SILENT is definitely cheaper than DRKSHDW but the desire is further consecrated by the touching and 'feel' of the fabrics.  I'm going all grown up and seeing  Soft, soft cotton tees are subtly distressed and not overly embellished with 'dishevelment…' (looking at brands that 'burn' holes into tees…only Robert Cary-Williams pulled that off properly…). 

The fabrics have gotten more diverse from the initial jersey offerings and two seasons in, elements like this polyamide are made into tunic tops/dresses that has both stiffness and movement in its shape… 

David Hellqvist (my successor at Dazed Digital and writer of Fashion in Politics) kindly modelled this bomber made out of the same fabric that also comes in a collarless shape that is a different take on the bomber…

My favourite piece of all were the summer knits that again are subtly distressed and feature a uniform-line of 'holey' knit down the sleeves or in the body of the jumper…

I've been stalking the accessories offerings at Oki-Ni because the oversized and unconventionally shaped rucksacks once again fit my brief for practical and unadorned bags…

The A/W10-11 collection which is dropping into stores now is a more sensual affair by the look of these images but broken down, are the jersey components that will probably be the mainstay of SILENT but perhaps other elements will make way to add some 'noise'…