Text by Daniel Rodgers - DAZED AND CONFUSED

Clothing so tight that it acts like a compression vest, stretched panels of lycra haphazardly bandaged around the torso, piped seams that press into the skin and hoick the flesh into position – to wear a piece designed by Mainline:RUS/Fr.CA/DE is to alter the feeling of being in your own body.

The expansive nature of the brand’s fanbase is a reflection of Alexandra Vincent, Zarina Bekerova, and Karl Felix’s international footing. Having first come together while working in Berlin – from Montreal, Russia, and the Bavarian countryside, respectively – even the brand’s name, a mash-up of its founders’ home country codes, is an ode to continent-crossing.

Indeed, since its inception, the label has found a protagonist in the kind of businessmen who emerge from airport terminals in crumpled suits and skew-whiff shirts – that and sexed-up dog walkers.

While these designers create work charged with eroticism, there is a hardness to their clothing that inspires a feeling of safety, like in the warped piping that vines throughout Mainline:RUS/Fr.CA/DE’s Pre-Fall offering.

That same collection is the subject of a new film, which follows a group of strangers as they brave the elements, schlepping across cliffed coasts and rolling fields before coming together in poetic unison. Think of it as an abstract retelling of how Vincent, Felix, and Bekerova first entered each other’s lives, vis-à-vis The Blair Witch Project.

But, almost everything can be improved with a wind machine and the film’s tormentous conditions only underscore just how good the clothes really are – with laddered column dresses, gnarly puffers, and sheath-like stretch jersey whipped up around the body in a furious gust of wind.