Threeasfour Fall 2023 Couture Collection

Fashion, a microcosm guided by its own rules and hierarchies, has, through the door of nostalgia, entered a hyper-meta stage where everything refers back to something else. On tour for Barbie, Margot Robbie is dressing in looks first seen on top models, some of whom were considered “living Barbies.” Archives are mined, resulting in reissues or refreshes. But what it all seems to come down to is reimagining what is, rather than what could be. The opposite is true with Threeasfour, who have always been pushing boundaries and seeking collaborations and inspirations outside of fashion.

Their latest couture collection, which comes on the heels of an all-digital line-up for fall 2022, explored the idea of a parallel universe. (Which in some way mirrors how Threeasfour, for more than 20 years, has operated in adjacency with the industry.) “When we had the fully digital collection, people did not believe that the pieces were digital; and they were really insisting,” said Gabi Asfour on the phone from London, “We got requests from celebrities, from musicians, from tons of stylists, from all over the world, and it was really sad not to be able to give the pieces to anybody. This season we made an equally digital as physical collection. So every single piece that you see digitally or physically has a duplicate.” (Placebo is Threeasfour’s partner for digital fashion.) Always believers in manus x machina, the team are back on form.

Sussing out which is which is part of the fun. “We want to confuse the viewers,” noted Adi Gil. “What is real and what is not real? That is the big question here.” Discerning between the two is a skill that will come more and more into play as technology advances. Spoiler alert: The opening look, an organdy dress covered with a fretwork of light-filled tubes was the real deal, but it has an immaterial “sister.” Look 7 also had a fabric base to which was applied 3D printed frills created in a collaboration with designer Alessandro Zomparelli using technology by Stratasys.

One of the topics the team probed while creating this collection was whether physical garments, and designers, will be replaced by machines. “We are answering the question by showing that we did all of this collection manually. We used computer programs, but did not let artificial intelligence guide and produce the final results,” noted Asfour. “Basically, it’s kind of like driving a car; you put the keys in the car and you drive it versus having the car drive you by itself.”