21.2 BEAST NARRATIVE: (A CONTINUATION OF 21.1 TO 21.2)
It could look at the more rebellious side of Naïve - still childlike but something somewhere darker, more distressing, more chaotic. A burst in your face. A scary jolt. It could be something almost discomforting, haunting, nightmare-like? The influence of Karim’s love for 80’s-90’s scary movies - Evil Dead / Beetlejuice / Dracula / E.T. - Movies with scary puppets and creatures. Old b-grade horror movies that are tacky, scary and unsettling, off putting. What perturbs you is what lures you in.
A disconcerting almost alarming feeling that won’t leave you alone and yet you crave it, you’re intrigued by it, it lures you, invites you into its crazy world. Something you know doesn’t seem right, unfitting or mismatched but it is exactly this distress, this discomfort, that drives your curiosity and your attention. Here what is off is right, chaos is good, what is unmatched is matched, wrong is right; the harmony of opposites coming together for the right balance.
Our mens and womens are often seen to be the same, this season highlights their independence - yes they use the same fabrics and live in the same world but they differ in characteristics and traits. Same but different. There has to be a distinctive love/ hate gut feeling when creating something, not play on safe or just plain OK. The male and female characters evolve into unsettling artistes, createurs, sculpteurs - crazy, almost unhinged creatives, whose thoughts, ideas, creations are unsettling to look at. Abstract, surreal, naive and innocent all at the same time.
Roger Ballen’s work, the subjects of his work, their drawing, sculpting, creating things with scraps of materials from their surroundings, unsettling creations of art in an almost very naive way. Beauty in the photographs all shot in black and white, in very unsettling light with awkward poses. Their art is an expression of their emotions and feelings within, their true inner self maybe in a way. He is the artist/the sculptor and she is the muse, the one he admires, desires, creates. He takes on the role of an artist with an uneasy mind, rebelling in his imagination from something haunting, distressing, stirring at times.
We, as a brand, often create items that maybe aren’t seen as beautiful, rejected or forgotten and we retrieve this idea of rejection to remind you of what once was there. There is something nostalgic, a reminder of what once was. Like a little souvenir or reminder of something that used to be. To not forget is one of our mottos. Something that’s wrong is right in this story or maybe what has always been right, in all of our stories, running through them all this time. Things need to be off to work, seeing the imperfection in beauty. This wabi-sabi, je ne sais quoi feeling. What is beautiful is never what is right to the eye, off is what makes it right.