A beautiful journey

The 2013 summer collection by Kedem Sasson was one of the highlights of Tel Aviv’s Fashion Week.

By ORI J. LENKINSKI
A beautiful journey (photo credit: Avi Valdman)
A beautiful journey
(photo credit: Avi Valdman)
If your image of a fashion show is that of stick-thin women with taut ponytails cheekily marching down the aisle in ever-so-high stilettos, then the Kedem Sasson runway presentation at Gindi Fashion Week would have come as a huge surprise. Though the models were on the frail side, their presence on the long, luxurious, lustrous path in Tel Aviv was far from cliché.
The 2013 summer collection is called Journey, an appropriate name considering the otherworldly nature of the clothing and the developing color palette from start to finish. From the moment the lights went up, the Kedem Sasson show felt distinctly different from other fashion shows, be it Paris, Milan, New York or inside the Gindi tent in central Tel Aviv. The models gathered in dim lighting at the beginning of the stage, creating the sense of a tribe, a notion Sasson associates with his body of loyal customers.
With softly assembled hairdos and square-cut flip-flops, the girls looked unassuming and at ease as they carried the newest of Sasson’s visions from fantasy to reality. Their jaunts down the long catwalk varied in speed, from confident strides to slow, plodding progressions.
For Sasson, the opportunity to show during Gindi Fashion Week was a golden moment.
“Gindi Fashion Week was an event the likes of which we had never seen in Israel before. It was so well produced and so respectful of the designers. I think all of us designers really felt important. The event was about art and not about the commercial element,” he said.
For Sasson, the chance to take the slide show of his imagination from the cutting board to full realization on this stage was a dream come true. “The essence of fashion is creation and free language,” he said. “Here, there were no boundaries or limitations.”
Sasson, dressed in a wool turtleneck sweater and jeans, sipped a cup of tea in one of several armchairs in his office in south Tel Aviv. The space, which Sasson took up two years ago, is a studio and a factory and is filled with small statues, bolts of highly textured fabrics and racks upon racks of clothing. Inside his office there is a large board on the wall, covered with tiny sketches of garments. It is here that Sasson began his journey toward the big day of his show.
Unlike many of his peers, Sasson rarely presents runway extravaganzas of this nature, keeping his attention on his flock of shops and customers. Therefore, Fashion Week presented him with a unique opportunity to paint a full picture, one that would be shown as a whole rather than in parts.
“I make large pictures,” he said. “I don’t care much about details. I need to see, from head to toe, the flow of each image.”
Sasson has a great deal of experience creating clothing for the stage, mainly for contemporary dance. His inside knowledge of movement helped him to evoke a timeless, larger- than-life sense of space and time during Fashion Week.
“Like a seasoned actor who knows when the audience will respond to him, I knew which pieces would get applause. I wanted each piece to leave a trail in its wake once it left the stage,” he said.
With the event behind him, Sasson’s task now is to make sure that all the looks seen in Fashion Week are readily available in his stores. And while sales are certainly on his mind, the afterglow of the runway show will undoubtedly brighten his daily routine.
“My first priority is to create beautiful clothes. When you are caught up in sales, it’s easy to lose that. Fashion Week gave me a chance to expose myself in a new way,” he said. For more information about Kedem Sasson, visit www.kedem-sasson.com