Summer is a separate lifetime when you’re sixteen, defined by that completely unjustified feeling of being invincible. Sleep feels irrelevant, any resemblance of nutrition even more so, and a random field becomes a great place to spend the night. Before your frontal cortex clocks in for work, everything tastes sweeter and every mistake feels necessary.
Luke Rainey bottles that state in Lifestyles of the Bored and Disenfranchised, his latest DAGGER show at Berlin Fashion Week. Drawing from his youth in a small town in Northern Ireland, the collection returns to one of adolescence’s most underrated feelings: boredom. That specific boredom that itches and inevitably mutates into chaos. There is nothing to do, so everything happens.
The DAGGER kid doesn’t dream of employment. They don’t care if their mascara is three nights slept in, if their hoodie smells like bonfire smoke and damp grass, or if there’s chip shop vinegar soaked into the sleeve. Their clothes have seen things. Everything is thrown together and layered for the very likely possibility that you won’t see your bedroom again until morning.
It’s adolescence at its most honest: messy, self-seriously emo, occasionally pathetic, but completely sincere. Maybe becoming a functioning, contributing member of society can wait.
Photography by Johanna Kirsch
Words by Evita Shrestha
