Chances are you’ll have heard that Balenciaga’s enormous Joey-from-Friends-esque AW18 coats have started dropping in stores (and can be yours for a pretty reasonable $8000, apparently). Now, another highly covetable collection of outerwear – this time designed by Shayne Oliver – makes its debut, as the Hood By Air founder and skiing specialist Colmar join forces on a new collaborative line.
Not one to rest on his laurels after his tenure as Helmut Lang’s designer-in-residency came to an end earlier this year, Oliver delved into the Italian outerwear label’s extensive archive and reinterpreted a series of styles for AW18. Jackets feature additional layers which hang off the shoulders like capes, parkas can be worn upside-down, inside-out, and back-to-front, and trousers feature wide, detachable panels. Given this is a collection straight from the mind of Oliver, the whole thing is totally unisex, too.
The offering is the first to be designed as part of the label’s A.G.E (Advanced Garment Exploration) line, which invites collaborators to reinterpret the DNA of Colmar in their own unique way. “Colmar has an incredible heritage in outerwear and is indisputably the master of ski apparel,” Oliver explains. “It was particularly intriguing to transform these collections and reconfigure them through street language and my own aesthetics. It’s an experiment in mood and energy that juggles the iconic products of Colmar with my sense of performance and a unisex approach to fashion.”
Accompanying the collection itself is a new campaign featuring videos shot on VHS and Super8 film by director Sharna Osbourne, and photography by Jordan Hemingway. Inspired by ‘Alpine nostalgia’, the series contrasts Oliver’s functional, progressive aesthetic against the picturesque backdrop of the Austrian Alps.
Take a look at the gallery above.
