Towards the end of Milk of Lime’s strong and accomplished show, a look came out worn by a male model—Milk of Lime does both womenswear and menswear—comprised of a black tee whose cap sleeves were edged in a fabric version of barbed wire, and a pair of slouchy black pants, long ribbon ties trailing in their wake; it was both effortless and ineffably cool. Yet what really made it stand out: Emblazoned across the tee was the legend, I Demand Poetry. “We need poetry back in fashion, because it has been forgotten lately,” said Nico Verhaegen, who along with partner Julia Ballardt makes Milk of Lime. “We find there’s so much diva-ism, and so much irony, when what’s really needed in our industry right now is honesty. Irony,” he went on to add, “is over.”
Verhaegan (he’s Belgian) and Ballardt (she’s German) first met when they were studying at the Royal Academy in Antwerp, and there was definitely something of that city’s raw and dissolute Flemish romanticism in this collection, particularly that of the ’90s persuasion. Milk of Lime’s third outing—made all the more impressive given Verhaegen and Ballardt’s relatively tender years—focused on a sinuous silhouette of jacket, billowing shirt, long skirt, and soft, wide pants, which embraced both construction and deconstruction, and it was one blessed with a wistful, almost melancholic charm.
The collection was built around a multitude of those jackets of theirs, shaped close to the body, with defined shoulders. Some were crumpled, some frayed, some pieced together, as if they’d been constructed then reconstructed. (I really liked those which had rows of buttons running from the cuffs to the elbows.) “The refined roughness is a big part of the poetry,” said Verhaegen. “A blazer might be perfectly finished but we’ve cut it off, cut it open, cut it back together again. The cut of the jackets is the same, but every one is different because of the materials we’ve used.”
Many of those fabrics, incidentally, are from deadstock supplies, and the new life Milk of Lime brings to them can involve layering them one on top of the other, like building up a series of veils; it was particularly evocative when used for their trailing paneled skirts, putting lace with chiffon with a silk and linen jacquard. Their color palette was mostly black in all its myriad variety, mixed with what Ballardt called, “non-colors…they have an indefinable quality to them. We had this idea of a layer of mist over them.”