threeASFOUR S/S´21

Adi Gil, Ange Donhauser, and Gabi Asfour began making masks early in the pandemic. Upcycled from leftover fabric from their spring 2012 collection InSalaam, InShalom, which blended patterns from the Arabic and Jewish cultures, they were masks with a message. “Under not the most pleasant circumstances, humanity has unified,” Asfour said over a Zoom call from their New Jersey studio.

If that’s an optimistic way of looking at the pandemic, the mask-making project did energize them. “We feel good about our place,” Gil elaborated. “The mask success is nice proof that we do make sense in this time.” The Threeasfour trio have been at it for two decades, but they remain avant garde outsiders in New York fashion, showing only irregularly on the Fashion Week calendar. After skipping last season—the last time we saw them on the runway was a year ago, when they were celebrating their 20th anniversary—they produced a spring 2021 collection that balances their artistic, experimental tendencies with more wearable ones.

Their sculptural collections are often inspired by sacred geometry. It’s a topic linking geometry with nature and God, that has come up more than once this season, probably because it feels like Gaia has decided it’s time to fight back. Their most recent collection was an ode to the plant world. On Zoom today they riffed about Vesica Piscis. The almond shape made by the intersection of two circles is also called the Womb of All Creation and the Eye of Horus, and it symbolizes protection, power, and good health. “For our new type of reality it’s the perfect theme,” Asfour said.

That almond shape took three-dimensional form on the more artistic, experimental looks in the new collection—conversastion starters, all of them—and transformed into Op Art prints on easy-to-wear tunics and leggings made in collaboration with the Japanese digital printing company Mimaki. The digital prints also have the distinction of looking uniquely their own.