Jasmina Barshovi collection

The birds are silent is a menswear collection, build around blurry memories. The starting point of this work is my nostalgia for the summer of my 16 and the boys with whom I used to hang out with. Time seemed endless and blessed, melancholic and cheerful at the same time.

Today, all I have left are pictures of this summer, often blurry, not well taken, out of focus, there is something clumsy about those photos. Added to these blurry images, there are of course my distorted memories that keep transforming through time and fantasies that I associate to this era.

The name ‘The birds are silent’ translates, to me, that feeling that we get when we try to remember something. We might have images appearing, just like flashes, but often the other senses are absent. Moreover, on a usual summer afternoon, the birds sing, and keeping them out of that picture, obviously marks a temporal break and obliges us to take a distance.

This collection is build by layers. First, we have the bodies of those young boys, on which basic clothes (because timeless) stack with prints, and over that comes screens, bringing yet one more distance between us and those silhouettes. Those blurry memories which I keep on referring to, appear clearly in the fabrics. Those blurry memories are indeed visual but are mostly about feelings and sensations.

Therefore to translate this atmosphere, I mostly worked with fabrics that are often qualified as fragile, such as organdies, cotton veil, silk mousseline, and even some technical fabrics that are strangely transparent, bringing a lightness and softness to this nostalgia.

Opposed to all of these transparencies, there are some denims, bleached or with prints, but also thick jerseys. The jeans are also in this fragmented theme; the fronts and backs are in two different shades, therefore two distinct layers.

The boy created does not exist, being a pure imagination of mine. We might feel him, guess him but we never get to see his face, because he is out of reach. He will always escape from us.

Photos: Jasmina Barshovi