Egonlab and Songzio give officer coats exaggerated length and cavalry jackets greater volume in The Art of Dark Poetry. The collaboration examines French ceremonial military dress through altered proportions, using the wardrobe of an imagined poet to connect historical tailoring with the demands of contemporary artistic life.
MENSWEAR
The silhouette starts with broad shoulders and a tightened waist. Sleeves curve around the arms, layers separate, and structures collapse, lending the clothes a spectral character. These changes make the body’s outline a defining feature of the collection. The elongated coats and enlarged jackets retain recognisable military references while expressing the instability of the character who wears them.
Frogging, soutache, braids, and cords carry that idea into the surface of the garments. Egonlab and Songzio compare their arrangements to handwritten lines, suggesting fragments of the poet’s work. Details once associated with rank acquire personal significance, becoming expressions of obsession and the effort to articulate difficult emotions.
The historical uniform provides a specific construction system for this exercise. Broadened shoulders, contained waists, and raised collars shaped the wearer’s bearing, while buttons and insignia communicated status. The collaboration adapts that vocabulary for private life, giving its elaborate details associations with vulnerability and artistic struggle.
Behind the clothes is a poet living in a chambre de bonne, a small Parisian room that offers shelter and confinement. The setting draws on familiar myths about the city’s creative life, including solitude, intensity, and melancholy. Within its restricted space, reality and imagination meet as the protagonist confronts his own doubts.
Writing becomes his means of examining those difficulties. The collection presents each poem as an attempt to identify emotional fractures and change his relationship with them. This imagined figure gives the collaboration a way to address financial insecurity, isolation, and the pressure to keep producing work.
The resulting wardrobe proposes a uniform for people who sustain themselves through creation. Its military references connect the grandeur of historical dress with the uncertainty of the poet’s circumstances, asking what artistic work costs those who remain faithful to their sensitivity. Clothing gives these questions a tangible form through its scale, construction, and elaborate trimmings.
The Art of Dark Poetry is available through Songzio’s official online store from November 9. An official launch event follows on November 11 at Galerie Noir, the brand’s Seoul flagship. The collection launches in Paris on December 3 at Songzio’s flagship at 10 Rue Charlot, 75003.
