EENK AW 24-25 during Paris Fashion Week

EENK AW 24-25 Fall-Winter 2024/2025 COLLECTION during Paris Fashion Week

Since its founding in 2013, each of EENK’s collections has represented a chapter of the label’s ‘Letter Project’, pondering a theme in line with a par- ticular letter of the Roman alphabet – K for Knit; U for Utopia; Y for Yes- terday, and so on. AW24 marks a full-circle moment in the Seoul-based luxury brand’s conceptual trajectory: Z for Zero to One.

Gesturing towards concurrent notions of completion and new begin- nings, the collection sees brand founder Hyemee Lee contemplate the value of ‘zero’ in East Asian philosophical traditions – Taoism in particular. While in Western cultures, the figure is typically perceived as a cipher for absence, Hyemee highlights its antithetical connotations of abstract pleni- tude – a state of non-being in which the boundaries between the individual constituents of a wider whole dissolve; a state of everything-ness, rather than nothingness, if you will.

It is this intrinsic relationship between ‘zero’ and ‘one’ that serves as the collection’s conceptual underpinning. Notions of how a whole is defined by the individual components it comprises are expressed through innovative experiments in colour, texture and couture-level detail.

Tufted overcoats envelop the body, cutting bold silhouettes that are the result of a clumped-together mass of woollen fronds. The fabric becomes a material baseline throughout the collection, appearing across trims, ban- deaus, a chain-appliqué dress and even a pair of men’s shorts. A cocoon coat illustrates the collection’s central theme through its composition – a gauzy tissage – while a bobbled skirt is crafted from three-dimensional roses, each painstakingly crafted from individual organza petals.

A brushed coat shimmers with metallic fibres and a pencil skirt and split-hemmed cigarette pants come speckled with glinting crystal embel- lishments; individual sparkles come together to create an uplifting visual texture, recalling the innumerable mass of stars that populate the all-en- compassing night sky. This sense of infinity, of endlessness, is alluded to through ballooning, couture silhouettes – from convex skirts comprised of fused strips of champagne satin to swollen bishop-sleeved coats, garments take a ‘0’ shape.

While prior chapters in EENK’s ‘Letter Project’ have demonstrated an in- tuitively eccentric approach to colour, Zero to One sees Hyemee resort to a binary palette of black and cream. Novel territory for the brand, this visual restraint allows for a more concentrated consideration of form and its relationship to the collection’s philosophical preoccupations.

Despite this opening of new horizons, the importance of building on a foundation of heritage is strongly alluded to in this season’s accessories. Traditional Korean sartorialism is subtly invoked by way of a leather ankle boot with a contrast upper – nodding to beoseon – while a slouchy shoulder bag with a belt detail offers a modern interpretation of the botjim, a bundle-style bag historically worn as a backpack. Proudly dis- tinct as individual entities, when brought together, the collection’s pieces amass to create a robust whole.

Runway Looks