Zomer (Q3744)

With their sophomore outing, stylist Imruh Asha and designer Danial Aitouganov debuted on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar for Fall. Not bad for a newbie brand.Zomer, the Dutch word for summer, is inspired by its founders’ shared roots and taste for experimentation, sophistication and color. Perhaps the artiest of the Paris up-and-comers, they have already staked out a place in the conceptual clothing space.During a preview, Aitouganov said that the duo’s aim for fall was to “counterbalance muted minimalism with pops of color and a voice that’s off the beaten track from white-brown-black-navy.” A sense of lightness, he added, is a niche in itself—especially when you look at what’s trending on the street. “It lets us cater to different moods,” he offered.Fittingly for an emerging brand that’s almost like a gallery, collaborations are front and center. For fall, that meant hand-blown glass pieces produced with Heven, the Brooklyn homeware brand by Breanna and Peter Dupont. While those were plenty impactful, they didn’t look light. Elsewhere, a showpiece of a beige overcoat with a slash cutout in front was one of a few pieces that nodded to the work of Lucio Fontana (the cuff bracelets, too, were noteworthy).On the commercial side, there were some promising ideas. A button-on bandeau theme, for example, could offer customers the chance to switch things up season to season. A color-blocked jacket, overcoat, and cardigans looked plenty wearable, as did a khaki cropped hoodie. A print not shown here, of Aitouganov's French bulldog, was cute too.Clearly, Zomer has both ambition and potential. The designer are already working with the new pre-sale platform Upfirst, and this week they will launch their own e-commerce site. But soon, they’re going to hit a fork in the road: going to a gallery and admiring an idea, a color, or a form isn’t the same as realizing that you want to—need to—actually live with that thing. Now that they’ve got our attention, it might be worth inverting the equation.