To be a viewer of Damir Doma's relocated-to-Milan show felt a little like a privilege. Doma takes the essential elements of the matter with which we dress ourselves—textures, volumes, colors (more strictly the lack thereof), and silhouettes—and then by refusing to overly elaborate, elegantly explains their potential. Crisp cotton and raw undyed linen were fashioned into tunics, shifts, or monkishly simple soft overcoats worn over sackcloth-puritan, rough-weave shirts. Black, white, and olive judo jackets were shorn of their combative stance and redrawn as raiments of ostentatious serenity. The grandest decorative flourish here was the transposal of netting from its literal form into the relief on overcoats and trousers. The net was cast again, this time golden, on a girl: hints of Hephaestus.
Sometimes Doma's clothes seemed almost clinically sterile—the uniform at some futuristic private hospital for minimalists. At others, especially when agate amulets and netting were combined, they seemed like the kind of things worn by some little-known pagan Hebridean tribe afflicted by compulsive mournfulness. When more processed pieces did emerge—a soft pink jacket with a roughly chopped notch collar and pin-tuck seaming, for instance, or a collarless jacket and pants hewn in a jacquard of gray flecks on black—it was startling. Pre-show, Doma said his themes were elemental, "bleached by the sun and energy taken out by the salt—I tried to keep it very simple." These clothes would be hard to wear unobtrusively to the supermarket, but they were indeed serene to watch.
