CGD

Before you can move on, you must reflect on everything you’ve created, look at it through new eyes. Last year was a turning point for the LAFORMELA brand. And not only because of the MAINLINE 24 and MAINLINE 24/25 collections, but also because of company restructuring, of transforming its creative process and its outlook for the future.

Winds of change could be felt even in the summer collection, which contained over twenty looks assembled from a variable number of tops, thematizing the fighting spirit and the desire to move forward. The summer collection, with its epauletted silhouettes and transparent materials, showed a taste for something new, something bigger. Miroslava Kohutiarová and Antonín Soukup joined forces with Stink Films Prague, director Jaroslav Moravec and Francesca Kolowrat to present MAINLINE 24 in a new way. Instead of a classic fashion show, LAFORMELA decided to take an audiovisual approach, much like during the pandemic when all the fashion houses were presenting their collections through grand films due to restrictions.

But why now? Film is a format in which you can oversee the slightest details, take control of every aspect and content distribution. You define what you want to say and how you want to say it, while always finding a certain “aha moment” in the overall process. As a garment creator, you find yourself in an unexpectedly intimate connection with your work. Watching the endless shots on the screen in the film studio or in post-production, you see all the nuances of movement, the imperfections and glorious moments of your cuts, you materialize a sense for your textiles. Putting your collection under such a “microscope” prompts self-analysis and changes you, whether you like it or not.

That is maybe why the grand MAINLINE 24/25 show, which took place in November 2024 at Nová Spirála, seems in many ways groundbreaking. Not only was it designed for this particular space, but it genuinely showed what LAFORMELA wants to be after its thirteen years of existence. Although from a creative perspective, we see the brand rather fine-tuning its previous silhouettes and using improved tailoring (barring a few exceptions, like experimenting with a new night gown and new materials), it is perhaps this drive to self-perfection which proves the brand’s evolution and its determination to move towards a new direction. Whether this will be a step towards small batch production, commissions for foreign distributors or towards even closer collaboration with Francesca Kolowrat remains to be seen. And to grow, one must build on strong foundations.

Jan Králíček

The word which best describes the works of Miroslava Kohutiarová and Antonín Soukup is most certainly ‘consistent’ – taken to mean the relative stability and coherency of mental characteristics and formal functions, volumes and shapes, their artistic language. Since 2010, their joint fashion project LAFORMELA has been providing such a coherent and stable position. These modern, subtly refined graphic garments are easy to combine with one another, whatever the season. Over the course of their career, the duo (formerly a trio) have been offering their clients sensible, opinionated outfits based in a modern anonymity. But although being coherent can sometimes harbor connotations of boredom, Mirka and Antonín keep playing around with a certain trendiness, ephemerality, superficiality and evanescence, and this gentle tension (at some times more literal) keeps their work from becoming predictable. In this way, LAFORMELA consciously balances on the threshold of surprise and confirmation.

This is most visible in the nominated LAFORMELA x KB collection, a special collaboration which provided the opportunity to use innovative materials made of recycled carbon. The LanzaTech technology is able to transform the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into ethanol which is then used to produce other materials. In this case, it served to produce a fiber which has a similar look, characteristics and functionality to polyester. The material is innovative, but so is the way LAFORMELA worked with this unusual and sometimes difficult fiber. They adapted the basic codes of their aesthetic codex and created silhouettes (for the first time also men’s) which remain modern and topical – quite an unusual feat in the category of ecologically responsible garments. And they used their futurist vibe in their main line which was also nominated this year. Its strongest features are found in stylistic variability, its ability to strike a balance between prints and textures, and the extreme contrast between transparency and density.

Jan Králíček