It's no accident that BLK DNM's Soho storefront doubles as the label's studio, showroom, offices, and all-purpose HQ. It's less an address than a laboratory for the brand, where founder Johan Lindeberg can test out his pieces at retail on his own time, see what his customers are buying, keep his ear to the pulse. And it's because it is such a laboratory for BLK DNM that when Lindeberg speaks of a new series of dresses—simple sheaths in rayon, really—as an "experiment" in his unapologetically jeans-jackets-and-leathers label, you can take him just about literally. It is an experiment, BLK DNM is a lab, and Lindeberg is a sort of mad scientist—albeit one reimagined as a philosophical cinephile auteur.
If that sounds a bit grandiose for BLK DNM, a line that's premised on doing the basics—jeans, tailoring, a leather jacket—and doing it well, it is. The BLK DNM project is at once ambitious and modest. It doesn't aim to do everything on earth; it does aim to do exactly what Lindeberg decrees a guy or girl needs. It's no use stacking the label up against the larger, more varied productions of major houses; it's playing a different game.
That said, over its seasons in business, the designer has worked to push it forward. His forever basics now come in an array of silks, organzas, and georgettes of varying sheerness but uniform drape. The leather jackets now come in non-leather brocaded jacquard, the tees in devoré velvet. Even the leather ones have cropped, voluminous-sleeve options that are more trend-driven alongside the classics on the shelves. All of which suggests that long after dark—when else could you imagine the mad scientist at work?—the laboratory is sparking with, if not entirely new ideas, new variations to extend and expand upon its chosen themes. It's already done so with enough success that sales grow season after season, new retailers sign on to carry the line, and soon, the label will outgrow the lab. And then?
