Tips: How to dress in a DARK style?

After explaining to us how to master preppy style , streetwear , workwear and rock , Vianney is back in our columns to tell us about a new style that is relatively unknown, and renowned for its strangeness in the eyes of the average man: the dark.

The dark clothing style: a separate approach

Generally speaking, people who are interested in fashion fall into two categories:

• Those who dress for themselves, for the gaze of others or to highlight their body, that is to say according to a “decorative” approach ;

• Those who see fashion as an artistic expression, with the multitude of intellectual approaches that this can induce, but always in a purely abstract way. The latter are less interested in the image they send than in the concept preceding it.

Obviously, for such a cutting-edge style, substantial stylistic prerequisites are necessary:

• Understand the different goth styles - street goth, goth-ninja, goth-experimental - in a thoughtful way (not like the latest guy from Hypebeast fan of A$AP Rocky );

• Master cuts, materials and colors, as well as the general balance of an outfit. Be careful, this is about going much further than simply having a “fit” silhouette;

• Make a clean sweep of all this knowledge to approach it from a completely different angle, more conceptual than pragmatic;

• Mix domains. Once the necessary parallels with other artistic fields are well established (anatomy, architecture, sculpture or even philosophy), apply them to the construction of a clothing style. And that’s the most exciting part of this style 😉

This in-depth knowledge of several areas is the first obstacle between the dark style and you.

Why is the dark style difficult to access?

This style has a second difficulty: it is the deconstruction process.

The dark style is what contemporary art was compared to classical art: a theory of the abstraction of matter (architecture, fashion), but also of the body.

You must therefore have the stylistic and physical bases (geometry for architecture, anatomy for fashion) to then deconstruct them.

Dark: for which body types?

This approach therefore requires a well-built body, responding more or less to the canons of beauty and classic proportions. It is therefore a difficult style for the larger and less athletic among us.

As Rick Owens said:

"Taking care of your body is the fashion of modern times. No outfit will make you look as good, make you feel as good, as having a healthy body. Buy less clothes and go to the gym instead."

This is how Lad Musician , a Japanese brand inspired by the looks of rockstars from the 70s, mixed with Japanese sauce, specifically produces clothes for people with specific measurements: over 1.77m, less than 65kg, narrow hips and shoulders . Suffice to say that this does not concern everyone.

An expensive style...

Last obstacle: the price.

It is a style without compromise, neither physical nor conceptual - since it is already an intellectual approach in itself - nor qualitative.

For this reason, most dark designers are unaffordable to ordinary mortals : a Damir Doma t-shirt, the brand's entry-level item, costs nearly 400 euros.

Nevertheless, the price, as long as one accepts it, is perfectly justified in the treatment and the absolutely unique materials of the piece. You have to touch the seams of a Carol Christian Poell coat to understand it.

We must also understand that these creative approaches target so many niche markets, with limited potential, even on a global scale.

The slow development of collections, often artisanal production and the limited market size are also factors that push prices up, even very high...

The diversity of dark style, between fashion and design

Each dark designer has their own universe, which makes the assembly of pieces from one designer to another quite limited - apart from some, which are quite basic (for dark...) to be combined without problems.

For example, the general shape of "drop crotch" pants (with a very low crotch, editor's note) will vary relatively little from one designer to another, apart from possible additions or variations (tightening straps, shapes and locations of pockets, over-skirt, etc.). This piece will therefore be a little more versatile.

Carol Christian Poell expresses it well:

“The term avant-garde has been completely overused. Avant-garde thinking is a solitary and pioneering act by its very nature. The exact French translation is “ahead of the troop”, before the mass or the crowd, which implies that nothing avant-garde will ever be fashionable.”

De facto, no avant-garde thought truly agrees with another, since it is the expression of a personal universe and its own vision of the world.

A microcosm of distinct dark creators

Thus, no dark “style” is truly compatible with another, because they are all the result of different conceptions, materialized in clothing.

Integrating a designer into your style means adopting a thought process and fitting into a uniform. Even if we strongly advise against the total look elsewhere, we are talking here, once again, about something truly unique.

There are Julius_7 supporters, CCP fanatics and The Viridi Anne fans... None will really get along with the other, even if, to the layman's eye, they are never just gangly guys with black sheets on their backs. the back.

It will always remain cerebral, never utilitarian, never “decorative”. OK, but what use can it be?

What can dark style do for me?

Trying to understand the dark won't do you any good if you just want to dress well, with clothes that fit you and that's it.

On the other hand, the moment may arrive when you feel stagnant. Wanting to reach the next level, you think you've bled everything you know about fashion, so you go around in circles.

If dark doesn't really appeal to you and you want to stick to, let's say, workwear. Studying it conceptually would still allow you to advance in your own style, by focusing on its fundamental principles: simplicity, in-depth work on cuts, materials, a complex aesthetic where everything is a question of contrast.

You will apply these principles in an abstract way to what you already know, discovering things you might not have thought of, which will sharpen your eye, and ultimately allow you to better shape yourself.

To do this, we can only give you the usual advice: find out about the brands, look at their lookbooks. More than ever, touch and try these clothes. Some collections are necessarily more successful, and therefore more in line with the designer's philosophy than others, take advantage of it!

As the Albanian mobster Liam Neeson calls on the phone says in Taken:

"Good luck."

Dark style, architecture: areas that communicate

The thinking of a dark designer is close to that of an architect in this desire to deconstruct and re-appropriate codes, and in the approach to volumes and proportions.

I therefore suggest that we rely on Les Cités Obscures , a work relating to architecture, in order to better understand this approach.

The example of Obscure Cities

François Schuiten, a Franco-Belgian comic book author born in 1956 from a family of architects and painters, was the designer and screenwriter of a series that shook the foundations of comics as we knew them: Les Cités Obscures .

The principle of the series is as follows: instead of following a defined narrative framework with a beginning, an end, which features protagonists who live, love, die... everything goes in all directions.

Each album is a pretext for an in-depth architectural analysis. It is, somewhere, the city that is the heroine of the series. The characters don't matter much since what interests Schuiten is drawing buildings and showing the impact that a city can have on the lives of its inhabitants.

A bit like in the best Batman runs where Gotham City is not so much the city as a character in its own right, who literally dialogues with the Dark Knight.

Beyond the fact that this series is a masterpiece, the thought process of Obscure Cities is similar to that of dark creators .

Analogy between the dark style and Les Cités obscures

Each album / collection revolves around a unique concept which is treated thoroughly. Each page/piece is a brick forming the complete wall of the collection. A wall independent of the others which, at the same time, supports a universe / house of the creator, a bit like the theory of nested universes : everything is part of the whole.

Each wall is a self-sufficient concept and support, but its junction with the others forms another more general concept, a guideline of the creator:

• Rick Owens is primarily interested in the body and the power relations between clothing and anatomy;

• CCP, with textures that enhance the scalpel-cut silhouettes of its creations;

• The Viridi Anne is inseparable from the Gothic transepts ( transverse nave of a church, editor's note ) which fill each of its collections;

• Yamamoto is interested in refined architecture dressed in drapes.

Each dark creator is therefore the expression of a singular thought, the fruit of an intimately personal approach, which refuses to adapt to a mainstream mass in order to sell better or speak better to people. They just don't care.

But as we cannot completely deny the heritage of a movement, each designer also has his own specificities which mean that we can roughly classify them into goth-sportswear, goth-tailoring, experimental goth...

We will try to present some of them to you in a more concrete way through this prism.

The main creators of the dark style for men

CCP: the sartorialist

Carol Christian Poell, creator of CCP, left the fashion school in Graz, Austria, with one idea in mind: to make suits, but to move away from the “jacket/pants” vision, divided between proponents of Italian shoulders and proponents of English cuts.

The importance of fabric and related technical experimentation in fashion can, roughly, be divided according to genre:

• Women's fashion, more particularly Haute-Couture, finds its meaning in the use of new fabrics and styles, cuts and silhouettes, innovative techniques;

• Men's fashion resides in the immutable traditions of tailoring, which can be found both in a (good) entry-level suit and in the purest know-how of Savile Row (a district of London considered the Mecca of suiting).

There are of course exceptions to this principle, in contemporary men's tailoring employing the same codes as its women's counterpart, as well as in sportswear which, in terms of structure, is relatively unisex.

However, real innovations in conventional areas (shirt, coat, pants, jacket) are extremely rare and confined to avant-garde designers like Carol Christian Poell, who has built a reputation as a "researcher" rather than a creator.

A scrupulous work of craftsmanship

This notion of research is essential in his work and applies to all stages of his laborious creative process - from experimental fibers and inventive manufacturing techniques to the resuscitation of ancestral, almost forgotten leather processing practices.

Most of CCP's creations are made or finished by hand in Italian workshops, but he has also collaborated with Japanese fabricators who work in the old-fashioned way to produce unique fabrics.

The meticulousness of the process and the attention to the smallest detail are reflected in his clothes in two ways.

Most have no lining, so the construction remains bare to the wearer's eyes (especially in coats, with open or taped seams). This emphasizes the practical end purpose of the garment, stripped of all artifice.

He is also particularly attentive to surface effects. Show the inside and outside of a weave, for example, by physically separating the weft and the warp. In working with leather, he reverses the usual production techniques.

With its directly assembled shoes, which are then partially covered with polyurethane and, finally, tanned and dyed.

A personal and confidential vision

One of the guidelines of his work is also the interest in the body and sexuality as the ultimate expression, a theory that he tries to convey in his work.

His ostrich or kangaroo skin jackets, for example, embody an ode to the fusion between flesh and concept.

This whole process means he works entirely outside of the usual cycles of shows and the fashion calendar. He takes his time and only discreetly announces his collections, most of which are timeless models reworked from one year to the next, forming the essence of his brand.

Sruli Recht: the experimental

Sruli Recht is a Lithuanian designer who launched his own line in 2005... and deviated slightly from the classic canons, after having cut his teeth at Alexander McQueen.

The latter, despite today's more classic productions, established himself upon leaving school in 1992 as an experimental designer with the dresses made from women's hair from his Jack the Ripper collection.

The taste for performance

One of Sruli Recht's most recent achievements, for example, consisted of having a strip of flesh taken from the abdomen (with the hair), to remove the fat, salt the skin and then tan it in an alum solution.

The result is on sale for $350,000 on his site (and the video of the performance is available on Youtube - be careful, not recommended for the faint of heart).

He also made a pen-engraver on carbon glass, a scoped rifle in maple scratched with horsehide, etc.

A generalist approach which is therefore closer to the true avant-garde designer, or even the performing artist, than to the simple couturier.

His Circumsolar collection was made solely from tiger skunk leather, translucent lamb, a Kevlar derivative capable of withstanding a mortar attack... and meteorite fragments.

Sruli Recht's workshop

All of his clothes are made in a maximum of one to ten copies, in his workshop in Reykjavik (which has not stopped his fame from crossing the cliffs of the island). All are mounted in one piece and with a single pattern depending on the size of the part used.

The workshop itself - “the Armory” - is defined by its director as a hybrid discipline, on the border of shoemaking, product design and architecture. Every month he releases a “non-product” that ranges from bulletproof scarves to sharkskin gloves (with the spikes turned inside, which makes it impossible to remove, unless you cut the hand or the glove once that we put it on).

A good portion of the customers who enter the store are people who have made a mistake and are looking for a pistol or rifle.

Recht hates talking about process and prefers to “find a way of doing things that works for everyone.” However, over the years he has developed a system that is simple to implement by making 1/2 scale mannequins from a 3D model, laser cut into sheets of cardboard glued together, over which he drapes the fabric.

The pattern is then marked on the fabric without going through sketches, imported into Illustrator, cleaned, doubled in size and finally cut by laser. A whole high-tech process!

The street goth

Jun Takahashi, close to Miyashita, the creator of Number (N)ine and The Soloist , says that what “separates them from less recent Japanese creators like Rei Kawabuko and Yohji Yamamoto is (their) innate understanding of the culture of the street, especially music”.

This is something essential to understanding street-goth, a mix of influences that emerged at the end of the 2000s from the sidewalks of Harlem before being popularized by A$AP Rocky and Kendrick Lamar, in reaction to the neon trend that ruled this era. era.

It is characterized by a subtle mix of streetwear pieces and other goth-ninja inspired pieces, mainly simple basics, jodhpur pants, high-neck jackets from Rick Owens, etc.

The two don't have much in common:

• The goth-ninja is (to caricature) made up of fanatics dressed from head to toe by a single designer. They have adopted the philosophy and spend their day looking for THE good deal on the Japanese proxies of eBay or the Superfuture market.

• Street-goth fans are much more mainstream and unabashedly deviate from one of the main rules of sartorialist and experimental goth trends: price and materials.

We see them mixing sharp pieces with less expensive street pieces with ease.

In Black, iconic street goth brand

En Noir is one of the flagship brands of the trend, it notably incorporated Rob Garcia, the creator of Black Scale , the other muse brand of the movement.

The brand stands out for its loose t-shirts, with prints of paintings from the Quattrocento (Renaissance period, editor's note) , and leather sweatpants. Rob Garcia draws his inspiration from Givenchy, Balmain, but also from more obscure brands like the defunct Nom de Guerre for his creations.

The creative process has absolutely nothing to do with the two previous trends: we are here in a brand, resolutely, and not a creator . And mainstream in an assumed way what's more, even if it incorporates more cutting-edge elements. The goal is not to create a niche or a philosophy, simply to sell a trend.

No street goth brand will therefore take pride in its materials or its unique weaving: it makes “edgy basic” pieces, made to be worn everywhere and by everyone, but not without displaying a luxury image.

For example, most En Noir tees are waxed, and all the zippers come from RIRI, a Swiss brand that almost has a monopoly on the best zippers in the world.

Dainius Bendikas: wabi-sabi

Dainius Bendikas is a Lithuanian designer who did his final internship at Sruli Recht. He has retained the taste for experimentation and the relative coldness of creation.

His creative process lies at the border of several dark trends and forms a style in itself which, like InAisce , could be described as futuristic.

Icelandic designer, Japanese influence

Dainius Bendikas is above all the perfect expression of the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi . Zen aesthetics postulates seven axioms to achieve the (im)perfection of wabi-sabi:

• fukinsei , asymmetry;

• kansô , simplicity;

• kôko , austerity;

• shîzen , the natural;

• yūgen , the subtle awareness of beauty;

• datsuzôku, freedom of speech;

• seijaku , silence.

These seven principles form the awareness of immanent, imperfect and incomplete beauty, which can be found in the apprehension of time passing, or the contemplation of an unsealed stone on an otherwise perfectly regular paved path.

It is an aesthetic that we find in dark trends, with a love of old techniques (19th century looms), while making good use of high-tech processes (laser cutting, technical materials), and worked and worn materials. , almost point by point.

We also find the asymmetrical cuts, the purity and general simplicity of the lines and colors, the fluid printing and freedom of movement conveyed by the garment, despite its non-anatomical cut and, more simply, the almost non-existent communication around these brands .

This is particularly striking in the lookbooks of Bendikas or InAisce (notably Spring-Summer 2012 and 2013) which highlight natural elements in all their brutality, or their tranquility.