This season, Creative Director Shivin Singh draws heavily from surrealist and avant-garde visual worlds that explore the subconscious and the illogical. Salvador Dalí’s Head of Roses emerges as a central reference, informing both form and emotion. A collision of beauty and disquiet, familiarity and distortion. The work’s symbolic tension finds its way into silhouettes that feel romantic yet unsettling, precise yet fluid, resolved yet deliberately unresolved.

Further surrealist influence comes from the short films of David Lynch, particularly The Alphabet and Rabbits. Their fragmented narratives, uncanny stillness, and sense of unease inform the collection’s emotional register. Garments evoke the sensation of being suspended in a moment, as if time has slowed, loops, or fractures, mirroring the feeling of existing within a dream while questioning whether one is awake at all.

Sculptural references surface through the Sumerian priest sculpture, Prêtre Sumérien, lending the collection a sense of ritual, monumentality, and quiet reverence. This ancient presence is counterbalanced by the theatrical modernism of Oskar Schlemmer’s costume designs for the Bauhaus theater. From Schlemmer, Singh borrows ideas of abstraction, geometry, and the body as both performer and structure. These ideas are translated into garments that feel architectural, deliberate, and emotionally distant, yet deeply human.

The color palette is drawn from a profoundly personal source, a painting by Francis Bacon, Singh’s favorite artist. Muted, bruised tones coexist with charged, visceral hues, creating a palette that feels psychological rather than decorative. Color is used as an emotional tool, suggesting tension, vulnerability, intimacy, and distortion rather than functioning as a seasonal statement.

At its emotional core, Not What You Think exists in a liminal state. The sensation of discovering a place, a feeling, or a version of oneself while half-asleep. It captures the vividness of dreams, moments that feel intensely real, deeply connected, yet impossible to fully explain. There is a persistent sense of recognition without understanding, of knowing without proof, and of connection without narrative.

Silhouettes continue to evolve with restraint and intention. Elongated proportions, controlled drapes, and subtle structural interventions define the collection, while tailoring and construction are pushed quietly forward. As with previous seasons, Absent Findings resists spectacle in favor of precision, atmosphere, and emotional density.

Not What You Think is not a conclusion, nor a departure. It is an extension of an ongoing excavation into memory, surrealism, dress, and the spaces between perception and reality. It asks not to be understood immediately, but to be felt, lingering long after first contact, like a dream that refuses to fade.