Their encounter sounds like a comedy movie: Andreja and Maja met during a wedding party, where they were the only smokers between all guests. A curious destiny’s trick – we could say – but it has allowed the genesis of DIORALOP: the Croat label which won the Best young designers ELLE Magazine Style Award, just last year.
Like any noteworthy design duo, the different education of two members equilibrates the game of couple: Andreja Bistricic obtained a degree at the Faculty of Textile and Technology in Zagreb, then specialized her studies in womenswear at the St. Martins College in London; Maja Merlic is an architect with the passion for digital printing and the mania for Polaroid pictures.
Indeed the palindrome name and also the imagination of the brand refer to this kind of photography, which permits to obtain various colours and patterns, using special chemical products and different techniques of exposure. The same colours and patterns can be digitally reproduced on several luxurious fabrics. DIORALOP sounds like a “diorama”, these depictions that can give you the illusion of a real scenery, just employing particular enlightenment; for the next season, scratches of lights and shadows cover the surface of clothes, as if the canvas couldn’t totally absorb the temper or someone would have dunk the garments into the mug.
The setting of menswear look-book is so much coarse: an ex industry area, an abandoned building site, overawed by oxidized wood and rusty iron foils. A location under decomposition that seems to corrode all creations: the deconstructivism of forms results in overlays of different length.
Real and precise incisions cut the back of jackets that become like supporting skeletons, breaking the male spine into well-defined parts; furthermore pockets and folds multiply along sleeves of shirts, turning them into shells, textile and wrinkled exoskeletons.
But oversized lines and overlapping materials go back to blend in with black and white, antithetic monochromes par excellence. Therefore it isn’t a coincident if the collection’s name is 4, because “4” is a symbol number in the Bible: on the 4th day God separated light from darkness, Sun from Moon, as the designers explain.
This act is well represented by F/W2013-14 campaign video – which you can watch on the official website www.dioralop.org – where the day and the night chase each other and rejoin like two young lovers. And the cycle starts again.
