Imagine waking up in a warm, sunlit room on a Sunday morning in June. The crystalline light and invigorating summer warmth radiate through the windows, enveloping you. Barefoot, you drape yourself in a white linen button-down top and a dewy pastel-yellow pocketed bell skirt, as you draw in the fresh morning air. You feel easy, light, and free.
This simple, yet breathtakingly fresh, aesthetic is precisely the philosophy guiding the designs of burgeoning Italian designer Serafina Sama, who has just finished presenting the third season of her womenswear label, Isa Arfen. The label’s Spring/Summer 2014 collection features a variety of beautiful minimalist separates, including gorgeous, draping white button-downs, wide-legged cropped pocketed pants in easy neutral tones, and pastel-colored linen bell skirts with buttonless linen tent jackets. The sense of effortless femininity is achieved through careful color combinations of fresh pastels paired with neutrals, the use of textured cotton, silk, and linen fabrics, and with the conscious exclusion of fussy details.
Isa Arfen’s ready-to-wear film short for the Spring/Summer 2014 collection perfectly expresses Sama’s visual philosophy and vision for the modern woman. The clip features a woman in a light-filled room rhythmically moving to a slow piano tune. She moves her bare feet inch by inch across a wooden floor, while she playfully circles around the room. Her white linen dress dreamily floats around her, decorating each movement with a relaxed elegance and comfortable motion. In another scene, she moves around the room in a simple, almost folkloric, fringe-beaded top that jingles to the soft tambourine beat in the background. She moves with ease within her clothes, expressing the label’s philosophy that fashion is ultimately about the woman in the clothes, rather than about the clothes on the woman, and that clothing should serve to emphasize a woman’s natural beauty by becoming a flowing extension of a woman’s organic movements.
In a way, the label can be seen as authenticating minimalism—an aesthetic that designers (such as Donna Karan) have recently been experimenting with through austere cuts and hems, stark color palettes, and the complete annihilation of texture—by redefining minimalism as “natural” and harmonious with the body.
Serafina Sama is effectively replacing Piet Mondrian’s Composition 10 with Rothko’s No. 61 (Rust and Blue). Both works are decisively minimalist, but Rothko eliminates harsh, synthetic, geometric simplicity for a softer and more authentic expression of human emotion. Pretty refreshing to see a single Rothko hanging on a wall teeming with hundreds of Mondrian’s, no?
As refreshing as it is to see Serafina Sama’s new approach to minimalism, which emphasizes the organic and corporeal nature of a woman, more important questions remain: will this budding label survive among the sea of the bold, original, experimental labels (such as Kenzo) that are, currently, so prized in the fashion world? Will Isa Arfen be effective in captivating the souls of women seeking to embody earthly simplicity?
Ultimately, the survival of the gorgeous new label will depend on its aesthetic translation to the most fashionable of women, and on its profit potential perceived by prominent luxury goods groups, such as LVMH, which has recently been investing in other budding fashion brands such as Kenzo and Berluti, in hopes to fuel company expansion.
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