When L.A.-based designer Jasmin Shokrian began drafting ideas for her Autumn/Winter 2015-16 collection, she had just seen the small painting Possibilities At Sea, by Paul Klee, at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. She couldn’t shake the feeling the work gave her; it got her thinking about nautical travel, and not only the possibilities at sea, but also the expansiveness, the seemingly horizon-less, awe. That idea of the open ocean and the overwhelming sense of solitude it can evoke made Shokrian wonder how connected we really are to one another in today’s hyper-connected world – lost at digital sea.

It reminded her of Bas Jan Ader, the late Dutch artist known for the intimacy of his sometimes-quirky, sometimes-devastating performance pieces – short films of him falling over, or crying into the camera. In his final work, In Search of the Miraculous, he set sail across the Atlantic from Cape Cod and was mysteriously never seen again. These influences and the thoughts they provoked led to a collection of nautical references imbued with the romance of the sea and stripped-down essentials meant for survival – a sail-shaped top of silk wool in the color “Froth,” a protective waxed anorak. They also inspired the video Shokrian made for the collection, “Thoughts Unsaid, Then Forgotten,” in collaboration with Russian filmmaker Andrey Isakin and model Kira Pievskaya.