Anticipation of a new beginning. Awe in the face of beauty. A silent resolve.
Formless feelings have long been translated into form.
Form is merely a symbol, while the true essence rests deep within.
Dear Shaded Viewers,
The IM MEN Formless Form collection unfolded like a study in stillness and motion, where each piece seemed to emerge from the memory of a gesture rather than from a conventional pattern. CLAY, with its sculptural silhouettes cut from a single responsive fabric, traced the body without constraining it, as if heat itself had sketched the contours and then let them soften into ease. DAWN carried the sky on its surface: slow gradients of color drifting across a single expanse of cloth, front panels wrapping and crossing like an oversized stole, suggesting the moment when night and morning briefly touch.
The collection’s outer layers continued this conversation between protection and exposure. OVERLAP, part coat, part poncho, could be reconfigured by lifting and releasing panels around the shoulders, turning a single garment into shifting silhouettes that moved from sheltering to open in one gesture. RAFT amplified volume into a padded, quilted presence, its matte, textured surface and recycled filling trapping air and warmth so that the coat became a kind of wearable cocoon, sculptural yet quietly humane.
Materials told their own stories of time and touch. GRADATION WOOL carried color that seemed to seep from within the fiber—each roll dyed individually so that jackets, trousers, and jumpsuits shared a family resemblance rather than a uniform, their tuxedo‑like details giving formality a softened edge. KASURI, woven from four different yarns using the traditional kasuri technique, revealed infinitesimal shifts in pattern where the hand had intervened, its asymmetrical jacket and trousers cut from a single rectangle that draped, wrapped, or even formed a hood depending on how the buttons were set. FRONT BACK played with duality: a continuous pattern in double‑faced wool, matte on one side and faintly luminous on the other, allowed coats and jackets to slip into long vests or to let their sleeves fall into hoods and stoles, the satin lining only flashing into view when collars and cuffs were turned.
Elsewhere, the notion of the edge became a point of emphasis rather than an afterthought. SELVEDGE WOOL, woven in Bishu, allowed the words “IM MEN” to run along the selvedge like a quiet signature, its square‑based construction releasing into an organic drape once worn, as if the garment remembered its origin as a flat plane. Accessories extended this language: LEATHER PLEATS translated the brand’s pleated, architectural clothing into bags whose broad folds held both sharp lines and soft collapses, promising a patina that would deepen with wear. TO GO, a small ode to the take‑away coffee cup, reimagined an everyday disposable form in leather, suggesting that even the most ordinary silhouettes can be endowed with permanence and care when the material shifts.
What lingered after the show was the way color and form refused to remain fixed. Inside, the palette moved in measured tones—dusk, cloud, the faint glow of morning—mirroring the gradations running through the cloth and the garments’ ability to morph from coat to cape, from vest to hood. Outside, as the audience spilled into the street, those quiet hues seemed to blossom into a real rainbow in the sky, a serendipitous echo of the collection’s chromatic journey from shadow to light. In that moment, fashion, atmosphere, and emotion aligned: a reminder that form, no matter how meticulously constructed, is only a vessel for something less graspable yet more enduring.
“As the surface is pared away, drawn closer to that quiet presence
from a piece of cloth, the sense of something ‘proper’ begins to rise.”
Later,
Diane
