Nehera’s Samuel Drira is not a minimalist. The deconstructed apron-style jackets, ample patchwork skirts, and white shirt-sleeve pants that were among his opening looks confirmed as much. Usually, achieving such complicated designs while also conveying a strong impression of ease comes from a maximum amount of trial and error.
Drira’s show notes described the collection as “an idea of harmonious imbalance” and “getting dressed as [an] intuitive collage of emotional bits”—intriguing notions that seemed both accurate and oblique, especially when perhaps expressed as a smoking reworked into three parts and spliced with sport accents, so that the outcome seemed effortlessly askew. Backstage, he boiled down these cerebral concepts into a trifecta of techniques: “Twisting, cutting, and knotting.” He also noted that for all the unpredictable volumes, offset hemlines, strategic slits, and morphing functionality (a scarf trailing off into sleeves), the collection consisted of basics: trench coats, suits, knitwear, T-shirts. But layered and paired together, the looks were anything but basic. Even when the handkerchief folds and duster coats were stripped away—revealing waterproof vinyl evening pants or a cropped top and tube skirt in scrunched cotton embedded with metal—the statement was pure without being simple. And this will speak to women who seek clothes that aren’t bound to any particular time or place.
As it turns out, Drira embedded elements executed by artisans located near the brand’s base of Bratislava; the indigo dyeing and the xylophone-style necklaces in ebony and cherry wood that were made by an instrument maker both qualify as local. That Drira tied all these personalized elements together—or loosely clasped them, if we’re being literal—shows the steadiness of his vaguely Arte Povera, East-West vision this season.
