Heads painted like helmets, layered in leather and felt, Boris Bidjan Saberi's models looked like soldiers in a medieval/sci-fi hybrid army. It was indeed Germany's Bundeswehr that Munich-born Saberi claimed he had on his mind, but he'd filtered images of militaristic masculinity through his Bavarian background. If that makes you think of loden and lederhosen, well, Saberi was on your wavelength, right down to using Loden Steiner, classic Bavarian clothmakers, to make his hand-felted fabrics. But he reconfigured those kitschy Tyrolean totems, shifting proportions, cropping, elongating, cutting on the diagonal, and using a distinctly un-Bavarian red as his key color. (Blue is traditional.) "Red is violence," Saberi explained. When he layered a red apron over black tailoring, you might have been reminded of workers in an abattoir. The designer is clearly fearless about such associations.
But if the industrial edge was signature Saberi, there was actually a more romantic undercurrent in this collection, in the same way that you can track a seam of peculiar poetry in Rick Owens and all his offspring. Saberi told the story of a modern nomad, dressed for stress and a speedy getaway, with a blanket rolled on his back and everything else he needed packed in a couple of saddlebags. The war has already begun.
