What do you think Torishéju Dumi’s collection is about, with its denim trousers with tone-on-tone harlequin lozenges climbing up the legs, the many-sleeved cardigan atop a skirt that seems like one long band of buttons, the ballgowns that seem to grow out of tailored waistbands?
If the London-based designer had her way, she’d leave you to your own narrative devices because she feels drawing one’s own conclusions on what garments mean “really actually tells a truth about the clothes,” she told WWD.
One unassailable claim is that hers are very good.
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For fall, her starting point was the adage that “when it rains, it pours,” a phrase that her mother would often use in the designer’s youth. Dumi said she wanted the clothes to be “the calm in the storm,” even as they expressed the chaos and pressure of problems compounding as fast as a car pileup on a busy freeway.
Ideas came thick and fast. Her horned jacket came this time in a denim chosen for its resemblance to wool twill. What felt sharp now curled into rose-like whorls on the fronts of blazers, a signature of her label that she described as a form of “weird beauty.”
A ballgown seemed to burst out of a suit. Sleeves wrapped around the bust into a top. Coats, dresses and cardigans looked wrapped and layered as if swallowing the wearer, with echoes of Nigerian lappa and traditional Yorubaland shapes mixed with slightly off-kilter tailoring. Fabrics like boiled wool and duchess satin helped her twist and tie clothes around the body.
Like Jane Campion’s “The Piano,” which Dumi watched on repeat while developing the season, this collection lingered on the mind, unsettling, romantic, oddly hopeful and worth seeing more than once.
