When Ladislav Zdut and his team started working on this collection back towards the tail end of 2020’s first wave, they were hopeful. Some of those hopes—as evidenced by a long-yoked blue poplin shirt named ‘Biden’—have come to pass. Others, not quite yet.
The lockdowns of then, since, and now have at least, said Zdut, provided: “emptiness for meaningfulness to occur.” Nehera was hardly an excessively or aesthetically profligate brand in the first place, but post-pandemic Zdut has doubled down on the conviction that “luxury should be confined by functionality and comfort. Because excess is not normal any more. And extravagance with no purpose is not normal.”
The clothes that resulted were not as puritan as that manifesto suggests. The prints, designed in partnership with the Juraj Straka, the Antwerp-based alum of Hermès, Schiaparelli, and Dries Van Noten, were not functionally purposefu—what decoration is?—yet enriched the visual texture on georgette shirting and satin suiting. Experiments in layering saw a pleat-hemmed shirt placed under a shorter sheer viscose turtleneck, and a tuftily fibrous bouclé polo shirt worn above one of those checked dresses: these delicate rewrites of the conventional shorter-below, longer-above hierarchy of worn facade were gently arresting. Double-jacketing, a reversible trench in competing panels of beige and sage, down coats with unzippable skirts, and narrow cigarette pants with pleated panelling that fell and fanned down from the left hip were further interrogations of the purely functional manifesto that inspired them. This collection of soft tailoring was abrim with adaptable and mix-and-matchable pieces you could see living a fruitful worn life across many seasons to come.
