Siki ImPhoto: Courtesy of the Designer With love of meticulous and rugged tailoring and an East-meets- West vibe, Siki Im flips menswear on its head. The onetime skater/artist/DJ/architect brings intellectual rigor to his eponymous label and its extension line, Den Im, by dipping into a broad range of influences. “Every season I have a concept or theme which interests me and I research [it],” he says. The 37-year-old multihyphenate, born in Cologne, Germany, to Korean immigrants, graduated from Oxford University, where he studied architecture on a scholarship. He transitioned to fashion in NYC, working for Helmut Lang and Karl Lagerfeld, before founding Siki Im in 2009 with a “Lord of the Flies”-inspired collection. In 2012 he launched Den Im, focusing on jeans and cotton basics. Not technically a diffusion line, the brand is presented alongside the main brand as a “brother” meant to be merchandised and worn together. Im’s known for a dark palette and a drastic rethink of men’s tailoring, but he constantly tries to reinvent himself. “I like to surprise people,” he says. For spring, Im looked back to his skater days with denim outerwear and overflowing, Jedi-esque ponchos (“Star Wars” was also a childhood love.) And he introduced vibrant colors, such as fuchsia and marine blue. “I was always into American culture. Hip-hop, punk rock, skateboarding and basketball kind of shaped my youth, and kind of also my dream,” he says. He also drew on contemporary artist and friend Frank Thiel’s pos of vintage curtains, which Im scanned and printed as an eccentric fabric, used throughout both collections now available at Barneys. A pop of color punctuates Im’s spring ’16 collection, while belts gussied up with CDs and other computerage artifacts made in collaboration with jeweler Chris Habana got audiences thinking.Po: Courtesy of the Designer For a virtual map of Im’s multilayered muses, follow him online. “We put a lot of energy in our collections, like research and studies, and it gets lost in the shows,” Im told Vice last year. “So I have an opportunity with Instagram to show what inspires me.”
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