Inasumuch as she's the creative director of Cheap Monday, Ann-Sofie Back doesn't need to prove that she can design wearable clothes. Her label Ann-Sofie Back Atelje, which she shows in tandem with her diffusion brand, Back, provides her a platform to experiment and make pieces that are distinctive and unconventional. With her latest Atelje collection, Back took an interesting tack on that, exploring the Scandinavian concept of jantelagen, which defines a whole set of cultural values around the suppression of individuality.
Jantelagen made for rich fodder, evidently. Riffing on the uniform, Back's Atelje collection had an austere simplicity, with a lot of the action going on in constructed detail and fabric selection. The structured organza pieces, in plain cream and a deadpan stripe, were particularly nice, and after the riot of color on this season's runways, Back's neutrals felt like a palette cleanser. Elsewhere, the Back clothes were defined, largely, by this season's narrow belts. Strung just above or just below the waist, the belts operated as a kind of visual punctuation for pieces that were otherwise pretty straightforward, such as a collarless jacket in hot pink.
