Lately, Damir Doma has broken with the desert trooper and Bedouin vibes that characterised his work for so long and looked to new pastures, especially in his womenswear, which can sometimes appear so stripped-down it’s hard to see Doma in the details. Following a resort show at this summer’s Pitti Immagine, which dropped a bomb of very commercial, mature dressing on the designer’s fans, Doma did his best to youth it up in Paris on Wednesday morning with a collection closer to home. It was in asymmetrical layering that the designer took his point of departure, adding a sort of maximised perforation, which worked best when it appeared as a translucent layer over a skirt cut at the knee.
Doma played with sculptural shapes such as oversize tops and some tailoring, which sought to bring more complicated, interesting elements to the collection. But overall it often had a very practical, a little too comfortable look about it, which brought back those elements of mature dressing, which are best avoided in Doma’s normally so pulsating universe. An orange half skirt wrapped around a grey dress with a performance wear buckle, for instance, looked a little more apron than avant-garde. And not surprisingly, it was when Doma embraced that dark desert side of his that things looked up, most notably in the long black, asymmetrical one-sleeve gown that closed the show. It didn’t just bring a sense of Doma to the collection, but also a sense of sexiness, which is never a bad thing.
