CGD

The more we entrench our work is our heart, and the more intimately we engage our personal experience, the more urgently and authentically we can speak out. Adam Kost resolved to leave his comfort zone and, in his SS19 and Sensitivity reset collections, set off to places where he would never go otherwise. He managed to punch above his weight. The two collections serve him to communicate something essential and thorny; something that has already been in the air for long - and, perhaps unwittingly, has touched upon the future of men's fashion. Kost moreover resonates with the topical gender issues asked by fashion designers worldwide. His well-coordinated team provided for a chance to push the author's morphology a step forward, and his skill in the technology of weaving helped him express more than the classical tailoring does. While the SS19 collection still develops on his typical and traditional elements, rather merely innovating silhouette and solving the gender issue more or less stylistically, the Sensitivity reset collection shows the potential where Kost's work may be heading.

Having personally experienced the loss of sensitivity, he maps out the sensitive points on the body and ponders the very essence of touch. All this lead Kost to solutions, which in his work upgrade the silhouette and produce a new form in clothing. The openings in the overgarment, revealing the upper layers, create an interesting landscape of touches or, if you wish, ornaments, and transform the act of dressing into a ritual of self-exploration and self-discovery.

Jan Králíček

How far can a fashion designer get thanks to his or her meticulous knowledge of craft? Adam Kost - a third year student from the Studio of Clothing and Footwear Design, headed by Liběna Rochová – very soon grasped that it can be exactly where he needs to get. Today, when fashion is ruled by streetstyle and fast fashion, in which craftsmanship became reduced to the performance of a technologically perfect machine, he turned to classical men's tailoring. Having analyzed classical men's silhouettes, he gradually pieced them together via classical materials into topical and utmost personal compositions – chaos versus order. In his men's S/S 2018 collection, he literally personalized several models, grounding them in the individual needs of the particular wearers. This significantly helped him abstract the rest, where he managed to capture the essence of men's clothing the eternal contrast between individuality and uniformity. In his women's A/W 2017 collection, he worked with patterns in a similar way, but sought something substantially different there, finding inspiration in the traditional attires of native north-Americans. A significant part of Kost's work is also accessories. His span is quite remarkable indeed: he can equally well create art objects serving as headwear (the women's collection) and as a mass product of refined aesthetics (men's footwear, in cooperation with Bata).

Jan Králíček