Siki Im SS14

Siki Im has never been one to shy away from the darker sides of masculinity, and he put his penchant for progressive design to good use for Spring 2014, riffing on prison and hospital uniforms in a collection that bristled with tense energy. A quote from Crime and Punishment served as one starting point for Im’s pieces, while Alix Lambert’s stark documentary Mark of Cain, about Russian prison tattoos, was another. These inspirations resulted in a clean palette of grays and pale blue and rose, washed out as if viewed under faintly flickering fluorescent lights. Im worked with a looser silhouette, which he said came from the wider proportions of prison uniforms (which, he noted, ironically “suggest easiness and defy restriction”), and the models padded about the parking garage where the show took place in soft paper slippers, which gave them an oddly menacing air while at the same time seeming to take away from their power. There was a cleanness to the designs, from Andrew Westermann’s unadorned jumpsuit to Ian Sharp’s unconstructed blazer over harem pants. For the finale, the boys came out wrapped in various nylon constructions that had a sterile purity, serving as an embodiment of the lightness of redemption as contrasted, in Im’s own deeply philosophical terms, with the “heavy, confining quality of remorse.”

Text by Jonathan Shia
Images: Backstage by Betty Sze / Runway by Kirt Reynolds for Models.com

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