Inside NOMIA’s Studio

By Brodie Lancaster / February 16th, 2012 in Fashion / Brooklyn / 226 views

When we visited the Brooklyn studio of NOMIA designer Yara Flinn in January, she was anticipating the upcoming Chinese New Year, a day that had no importance for her outside the fact that its significance to her tailor meant she would have to wait an extra day to receive the remaining eight pieces of her Fall 2012 collection.

Luckily they’re only closed for that day—in China they’re closed for a week to a month. If you don’t get your stuff in before Chinese New Year, good luck. They understand that we’re in a crunch. One of the things you don’t think about is being creative but also thinking about the turnaround time for things.

For Yara, negotiating her artistic side with this practicality is just one of the things that aligns her with her fellow New York designers, who she shares a definite sense of kinship with in the lead-up to one of their biggest weeks of the year.

[Being a New York designer] means being a part of this amazing community of other New York designers. We all end up sharing the resources with each other, because it is really difficult to get your foot in and find your way and find good factories and find good fabric suppliers, so it’s kind of awesome that people are into sharing the resources with each other.

Yara balks at the idea of an ego in the fashion community in the city where she grew up, and names Daniella Kallmeyer, The Lake and Stars‘ Nikki Dekker & Maayan Zilberman, Duskin’s Stephanie Tran and her studio neighbor Samantha Pleet among her friends. “There’s not a lot of attitude,” she explains, “Everyone’s pretty down to earth.”

NOMIA’s Fall collection, which debuted at Lincoln Center last night, took inspiration from the light sculptures of minimalist installation artist Dan Flavin, whose complete works Yara had on-hand throughout the design process.

At first I was looking at Michael Heizer and more earth artists, but then I wanted to do something really cold and institutional-feeling. This time it’s all about color and lines and light and dark and that kind of relationship. I’m using some colors, for sure, but it’s more about the contrast between light and dark because that’s what really strikes you about his [Flavin's] installations. I’ve always loved his work. It really lends itself to designing. I always have this book around and it’s so cool to see one color next to another. And the colors stand out because of the darkness. They’re so fun.

Apart from the literal interpretation we saw at the presentation—fluorescent light tubes illuminated the end of a cross-shaped runway—Flavin’s influence was visible in the contrast between dark, earthy blood red and highlights of striking neon pink, as well as in the relationships between black and blues, greys and silvers.

From a starting point of primarily neutral tones, to her Fall 2011 collection that featured appearances of a dark green and her more recent Spring 2011—filled with aquas, corals and lilacs—it’s easy to see her affinity to color progressing.

Spring was definitely a lot more color than I’ve ever used. Fall 2011 was the first time that I really thought about using color more, so I just had that one green color that I incorporated. After I used that, it was like an awakening and I was like, “Oh my god, I love color!” For Spring I actually didn’t have any black; it was all color and white was more the neutral. It’s really interesting to use color and create a story out of the different juxtapositions of brights and dark and different color combinations, so that’s something I think I’m gonna keep pursuing, for now at least.

With the inclusion of boxy silhouettes and sleek outerwear in her Fall collection, it’s apparent that NOMIA is a label made to be taken—and worn—seriously. Considering the female villain archetype her Fall 2011 collection embodied, we asked Yara who she imaged would wear her newest line.

I feel like this upcoming collection is a bit more masculine, in a way. It’s very artsy, so I like to think of like, an art dealer kind of woman—more established, a bit older, just power-dressing and still creative. Last season was way more feminine, so it’s nice to have a muse, in a way, an imaginary muse when you’re designing. “What does she wanna wear? How would she wear this?”