When we grow accustomed to the minimalist stripes and checks of modern fashion, and become weary of the uniformity of contemporary life, traditional textiles acquire a quality absent from industrial weaving: a wildness, complexity, and singularity brought into relief by contrast.

In Cold Intimacies, sociologist Eva Illouz reflects on modernity: ubiquitous and highly standardized technologies and cultural techniques render commonality between people overly generic, eroding the specificity and exclusivity on which intimacy depends, and giving rise to a condition of “cold intimacy” in modern relationships.

DEFICELER Spring/Summer 2025 collection shares its name with this work. In the collection, traditional Bouyei stripes and checks are collaged with industrially woven solid plain-weave stretch wool and fine mulberry silk, marking a declarative return of ornament. We reassert the value of decorations rooted in region and ethnicity—from providing indispensable visual complexity to fulfilling our inner need for a sense of belonging through difference. When modern style becomes overly homogenized, that sense of belonging to difference can find tangible form in tradition—perhaps in textiles themselves.

In terms of cut, the collection avoids references to any specific era or culture, instead focusing on the interaction between ornament and the body. The placement, scale, and shape of stripes and checks on the body are carefully calibrated. These ornaments draw the wearer’s bodily awareness toward the chest, the waist, the shoulders, and so on—sites tied to our sense of bodily subjectivity. Boundaries begin to dissolve: between ornament and function, the avant-garde and the traditional. These distinctions are no longer clearly drawn.