“My ears hear what others cannot hear,” says the voice of young India in the opening moments of Stoker as she crosses a deserted highway and gazes onto a field of tall, dead grass. Indeed, the sound of her skirt billowing in the breeze is amplified, as is the clicking of her five-inch heels as she glides across the asphalt. “I wear my father’s belt tied around my mother’s blouse and shoes which are from my uncle,” she says.
It is no wonder a film that pays such painstaking attention to garments served as the primary inspiration for Koonhor’s Spring 2014 collection. “The movie was a true tactile experience,” says Koon Lim, who, along with his design partner Catrine Thé, forms Koonhor. “The close-ups of the textiles, the sounds they made, and how a pair of shoes or a belt could play its own pivotal role in the plot were simply amazing.”