Lumen et Umbra Women’s Debut

Lumen et Umbra, the under-the-radar Italian label known for its deceptively simple menswear, introduced their first collection of womenswear in Paris earlier this month. Issei Fujita, the Japanese-born designer who has been working in Italy since 1999, has transferred the same understated complexity of his men’s garments into tops, skirts, pants, and jackets for women. Intarsia, a technique for embedding visual details into the knitwear by inserting different threads, was the idea behind some of the designs. Fujita studied Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of the muscle groups, which he then implanted on the back of the cardigans and the front of his knit tops.

Fujita also continued his fascination with geometric forms, often present in traditional Japanese dress. The circle knit was inspired by the drawings of mazes in Hermann Kern’s book, Through the Labyrinth. The result is a one-piece, seamless cardigan. It’s four triangle segments are knit using a drop-stitch technique.