With ENCORE , a.v. vattev returns to dress codes that have come to define its brand DNA, loosened and reimagined away from familiarity. Signature silhouettes, constructions and details are revisited through a warmer palette and a lighter, more relaxed vocabulary of fabrics. The result is a collection that feels at once recognisable and newly unguarded: cinematic, sensual and deliberately pulled away from appearing too considered.

The starting point is the radical spirit of the French New Wave movement. Jean-Paul Belmondo in À bout de souffle provides the central impulse: a new kind of male character - romantic and rebellious, dressed with an instinctive confidence that makes convention feel almost beside the point. Similarly compelling is Alain Delon’s cinematic presence in Plein Soleil and Le Samouraï, fastening elegance, restraint and underlying danger. Against this polished sensuality comes Keith Richards: looser, rougher, irreverent, with the instinctive authority of someone who has never dressed to satisfy conventional dress codes. 

These references are not reproduced literally. They establish a tension that has always been fundamental to a.v. vattev: wearable and daring, relaxed and sharp, literary and visceral. ENCORE inhabits the space between them.

The collection opens with the wing collar, lifted from the language of the dress shirt and transferred onto a blazer. A traditionally formal detail becomes something less obedient, allowing formal and casual to occupy the same garment unapologetically. Elsewhere, the cut-out tank adopts the construction of a shirt, executed in satin or shirt-weight cotton and closed at the front with a precise row of buttons. It is an everyday silhouette made unfamiliar through a single intervention.

The sweatshirt follows a similar logic, borrowing elements from black-tie dressing while remaining light, breathable and easy. Full pleated trousers in cotton and pressed wool introduce volume and movement, cut with an unhurried proportion for a wearer who appears to have no one to prove themselves to.

A uniting element throughout the collection is the waist, one of the brands’s most recognisable points of identity. The signature scarf detail, previously worn as an external gesture, has been absorbed into the construction of the bottom silhouettes. By becoming a waistband, it morphs into a quiet piece of accumulated brand history built directly into the garment.

The celebrated / iconic / viral / signature Viper Cardigan returns in two new iterations: a knitted T-shirt and a ribbed long-sleeve sweatshirt. The original attitude remains intact, while the silhouette shifts towards something softer and more immediate. The collection closes with the collar belt jacket, another signature for the brand, in light grey cotton with its cocooned proportions contrasted by black leather detailing. Softer in presence, but still exact where it matters, it brings the collection’s contradictions into focus.

Belmondo didn’t dress. Keith Richards didn’t either.

In between them lies the world of Encore: somewhere amongst a film set and a back street, between a shirt button and a safety pin. Romance without nostalgia. Rebellion without costume. Elegance with something deliberately undone.

For SS27, a.v. vattev proposes a male character who moves between cinema and music, between desire and danger, sophistication and instinct. He does not belong entirely to either world. That ambiguity is the point.

ENCORE  is the freedom of looking as though you never tried.

Words Angel Nemov