Many creatives take heed to music whereas they work. A bit Andrea Bocelli right here, some ’80s New Wave there. Possibly a Mariah Carey interlude to make it by one significantly excessive hill of the day. In his Sundown Park, Brooklyn studio overlooking Gowanus Bay the place Peter Do usually designs, he does nothing of the type. “It’s useless quiet,” he stated in Paris over the weekend on the tail finish of Males’s Vogue Week. “It makes different individuals nervous, however I can solely work with out noise. In any other case, I can’t focus.” The Vietnam-born American clothier—who launched his eponymous model in 2018 and was just lately named inventive director of Helmut Lang—was on the town to current his shock collaboration for At.Kollektive. The primary inspiration for the brand new line he created in silence? A music gadget, surprisingly.

“I suppose it’s a bit ironic,” Do joked as he pointed to the oval-shaped accent. With beveled curves and a clean leather-based end, it’s the designer’s purse model of an Apple AirPod case, replete with a magnetic hinge and a sequence that permits the bag to evolve from necklace to cross-body. “This was some of the sophisticated issues we designed,” he stated, “however truly I’ve by no means designed something like every of this.”

A part of this yr’s collaborators for At.Kollektive, Do—together with designers Nina Christen and Kiko Kostadinov—was requested to create a mini capsule of authentic new merchandise utilizing leather-based from the 60-year-old tannery, ECCO. Every was given whole inventive freedom, together with ECCO’s highly effective manufacturing capabilities, to appreciate their desires into bodily merchandise. Whereas Do conceptualized versatility for the city setting; Christen, a Loewe shoemaker and Bottega Veneta alumni dug into ECCO’s archives for inspiration; and Kostadinov targeted on private items for himself, equivalent to a passport pockets, reflective of his two citizenships (he’s Bulgarian however lives in London). The Dutch architect Anne Holtrop, who was tasked with creating an setting, draped opaque, seamless hides over prime tables and chairs for a haunting layered impact. The foursome comply with previous creatives like Natacha Ramsay-Levi and Bianca Saunders and comprise what ECCO CEO known as Panos Mytaros, “a novel group of designers” that every one stunned him with what they made. “They’re solely distinctive, however as a collective, all of them 100% liked the method of designing: from working with our leather-based materials to the event of their collections.”

For his personal half, Do has included leather-based into his personal line since its inception, however sparingly as every part Peter Do the model makes is completed historically and by hand. And so when it got here to his machine-made, all-leather At.Kollektive assortment, the sky was the restrict. There’s an ECCO model of the traditional platform boots he launched in spring 2022, slick ready-to-wear clothes that pull aside into stylish layers, one other clutch that impressively detaches into two, and Do’s debut sneaker, which he proudly wore himself. It’s 100% calfskin leather-based that can also be water-resistant.

“It was a whole dream to design all of this and never have to consider all of the little completely different transferring components,” Do stated, hinting on the operational tolls the younger inventive has confronted over the previous few years. “It felt like being only a designer once more, not the face of something or in command of anybody.” Although he has labored at different firms earlier than—most notably below Phoebe Philo at Celine—the At.Kollektive alternative was a bridge between working a model and his new function overseeing one other. So far as different similarities, mum’s the phrase till his Helmut Lang debut this September.

Do described his Paris exhibition idea as a “room of leather-based,” and touring At.Kollektive’s pop-up house within the Marais there was the sensation of being misplaced in a deep abyss: guests floated by the darkish, cave-like interiors just like the designer’s spiraled silhouettes of style on show. An hour-long movie by Martin Margiela collaborator Anders Edström climaxed the scene completely: Maggie Maurer, Do’s long-time muse, seems in a black field sliding on and off every of the brand new items in a single seamless take. With no music to steal consideration, the one factor to do was stare on the assortment in awe.