In just her second season, Nayon Kim managed to do what many designers cannot do in 10 outings: She presented a polished, tightly edited collection with a distinct point of view that is ready to sell in stores.
At her self-titled brand Nayon’s first New York Fashion Week presentation, Kim offered a highly focused lineup of tailored and sophisticated clothes. The collection, called “Brut Generation,” was inspired by Brutalist architecture and the often-grim reality facing Kim’s generation of peers — and so she focused on varied depths of black, charcoal and gray.
“I have these refined forms and then wanted to include my viewpoint on our generation with a certain rawness. I found a quote in the Bible that says, ‘The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not comprehend it.’ I feel like that’s our generation right now and that’s the whole reason that there is no color in the collection,” she said.
A tableau of five floor-length wool and cashmere blend coats — some of them cinched with chain belts that will be sold as part of the look — presented a clear vision from a 27-year-old designer who graduated from Parsons last year.
Her highfalutin tailored look — a streamlined version of the princess seam coats and opera-going fare popular in New York in the late ’80s and early ’90s — offers a strong counterpoint to the casualization fashion has seen in recent years. Kim’s route to a dressier self, though, also offers a sense of ease with an element of uniform dressing.
It was evident in a strapless wool gown that — while aimed at black tie dressing — felt modern with an undercurrent of haberdashery. Those stunning floor-length coats were also offered in abbreviated shapes as part of a skirt or pantsuit. And jersey pieces that were digitally printed with a concrete texture motif offered the Nayon shopper some slinky, cool pieces to layer underneath.
The designer lives between New York and Seoul, where she has a strong foothold in an emerging fashion industry that now wields influence across the globe. All of Nayon’s clothes will be produced in South Korea, and the samples shown indicate the strong quality to emerge from Seoul’s Dongdaemun-area sewing workshops. Even the fashion industry veterans in attendance were impressed.