Nehera co-founder Ladislav Zdút has known freedom within restraints, and he let it loose with this summery collection. Zdút was born in landlocked Communist Slovakia when travel to capitalist countries was prohibited. He was just 10 years old when he started spending summer holidays at Balaton, aka the Lake of Swans, in Hungary. It was the 1970s and the location, he explained on a Zoom, “acted as a replacement sea for us who were forbidden to go beyond the Iron Curtain, either because of political views or because cost-wise it was too expensive. It was somehow the replacement of something forbidden.”
Speaking of things verboten, softness in menswear was not the norm all that long ago. This men’s season it was embraced almost everywhere, and ease was certainly the mantra here. Zdút conjured it with a cropped one-button jacket featuring rounded, unstructured sleeves, with a lace set that let the breeze in, with a bomber and roomy pants in a wool-silk blend. A pale yellow floral jacquard had a pajama-like feeling.
The team continued with the soft pastels of last season, this time borrowing from the lake’s natural beauty. A paprika red cotton boucle outfit that referenced the unmissable inflatable mattresses vacationers floated on in Zdút’s salad days was both soft to the hand and exciting to the eye. Largely one note, this mild collection isn’t going to make waves, but it successfully communicates the sense of lakeside calm and vacation mood that Zdút was after.