CGD

Tomáš Němec won last year's talent competition organised by Prague Fashion Week, thus making it very clear to the fashion world that he must be counted on. That is why his nomination for the CGD Award in the Discovery of the Year category is no surprise. The student of the Design of Clothing and Footwear studio at AAAD in Prague is nominated for two collections: AW 2022: Thank God I'm an Atheist and SS 2023: The Lady of the Lines.

The first collection was inspired by Lux Aeterna, a film by the French director Gaspar Noé, and is characterised by oversized silhouettes and the use of black colour. Black is the main asset of the collection, as it allows its recipient to fully concentrate on the processing of the individual garments. The colour spectrum does not distract him this time, because it does not exist. Another added value is the designer's emphasis on wearability. Thus, a woman with enough fashion confidence need not feel she is wearing anything excessive or even inappropriate. Unlike in the original styling of the collection, individual pieces can be combined and varied, thus making it possible to create more than the original six looks. Finally, the collection is absolutely independent of seasonal fashion trends and thanks to its deliberate austerity, it defeats trends with absolute certainty and continues to exist on its own, independent of time. It exists as an object used and enjoyed, yet also as a result of a creative process, limited only by the designer's imagination and his ability to turn it into reality.

Němec's second collection, The Lady of the Lines, unlike the previous one, is characterised by a refined play with the female body and its proportions, is not afraid of colours and is an inventive polemic with the androgynous and uniform present day. Its source of inspiration, Rychman's legendary 1960s film musical Lady on the Tracks, is obvious to connoisseurs of Czech cinematography, who also consider it to have been brilliantly used—especially in terms of the sophisticated shades of colours chosen and the deliberately exaggerated optical accentuation of body parts characterising femininity.

Despite their differences, there are clear connections between the two collections: the centre of their focus is a woman who needs no one else to be happy. Both collections argue that fashion should be primarily fun with a sense of irony. Their author has a clear artistic opinion and is not lacking designer confidence. Last but not least, what is valuable about Němec’s work and, in the context of contemporary fashion, extravagant? The young designer is not afraid of emotions. Both his own, which he fearlessly projects into his work, and ours, which his collections awaken in us. We care about his feelings and emotions and he cares about ours. We expect them from each other and are not afraid to show them to each other. 

Welcome to the fashion elite, Tomáš Němec.

Andrea Běhounková