Dark, foreboding and seriously brooding…the Jonathan Christopher Homme runway show was one of the best BDMOTP has seen all week. The models seemed extra fierce, while dark metal music and decoration ambiance was carrying things further and further down the well-trodden Amsterdam path of neo-goth collections, with the strange twist that hidden in a host of black perforated leather and other materials to which color has no use, there was this streak of bright orange in suspenders, wrist bands, belts, cords, and other strap lock wear so as in order to demonstrate and literally highlight that, as the announcement read, that men are getting BOUND by every step they take, even when moving through the ‘swamp of life’.

After all this is Europe’s industrial north-west corner and on the premises this week all shows have been held in either a giant ancient gas tank from 1902 or in it’s equally decorative machine engine room from times of yore. The show seemed to cleverly tap into these darker moments and darker times and the models seemed to relish the opportunity to show the collection while listening to dark metal, smelling burned wood, walking through mist and vapor rising to a sky filled and dislocated with birds, dark birds, crows maybe, moving about like the wicked creatures found in Alfred Hitchcock’s perhaps most famous movie under the same title name: The birds.

Thus, the models, scarred, bound and strapped in orange and dressed in perforated leather, walked through the misty & musky swamp while hovered over by dark birds. Birds – for who needs drones if you can get dark birds to cast a certain gloom. Tim Burton could have proudly served up this deliciously dark dish as a new movie set and when you then know that indeed Jonathan Christopher has been doing work for Karl Lagerfeld – another master to whom gothic imagery is no stranger – you come to realize that you have just witnessed a very special show for one very good collection.

Woe to the man who is not strapped and bound in bright orange while walking in perforated leather through the swamp of life!  For not every man is a rocker. And not every man is a biker. Yet some men they walk with the birds. And strapped in orange, their beautiful garments will set them free.

And while we noticed one small white bird floating among the host of brooding dark ones, this probably sums up best the Jonathan Christopher Homme Spring/Summer 2015 collection, “NEXUM”.

Posted by Sandro Joo and photos by Paloma Canseco.