Absent Findings
FW 2026/2027
Founded by Creative Director Shivin Singh, Absent Findings is a Dubai-based fashion house exploring the intersections of memory, architecture, and cultural heritage. The brand draws on forgotten fabrics, personal narratives, and surrealist imagery to create garments that are both technically rigorous and deeply poetic.
Sales Campaign
Address
At the moment, we are hosting online meetings only, as we do not have a physical space in Milan. During these meetings, we will be able to provide all necessary details regarding the collection.
We are also happy to ship samples prior to placing wholesale orders, ensuring buyers can review the pieces thoroughly before confirming.
Opening hours
Contacts
shivinsingh@absentfindings.com
contact@absentfindings.com
Not What You Think
Fall/Winter 2026/2027
Dubai, UAE — Absent Findings presents its Fall/Winter 2026–27 collection, Not What You Think, a further articulation of the brand’s evolving vocabulary and a quiet insistence on misdirection. Building upon the emotional and conceptual groundwork laid by SS25, My Personal References and SS26, Early to the Party, this collection neither departs from nor repeats what has come before. Instead, it deepens it, stretching familiar references until they begin to feel strange, unfamiliar, and newly charged.
With Not What You Think, Absent Findings continues its long-term project of defining a language through repetition, obsession, and refinement. The core references remain, architecture, surrealism, memory, the sari, and the psychology of dress, but they
are approached from a more internal, dreamlike perspective. The collection resists immediate clarity, inviting the viewer into a state of uncertainty where meaning reveals itself slowly, if at all.
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.
Early to the Party
Spring/Summer 2026
A collection that continues the dialogue begun with the brand’s debut SS25 offering, My Personal References. If SS25 introduced the personal stories, inspirations, and insights that shaped the foundation of Absent Findings, SS26 layers onto them new psychological and human dimensions, furthering the narrative with depth and intimacy.
This season, Creative Director Shivin Singh delves deeper into his enduring fascination with the sari, a garment he regards as the most pure and beautiful form of dress. The sari’s endless possibilities of drape are reimagined
in groundbreaking ways, each look pushing the technical frontiers of patternmaking and craftsmanship while celebrating the fluid elegance at the heart of the garment.
The modernist architecture of Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh, a site of personal resonance where Singh’s parents first met as students of Panjab University, remains a crucial reference. For SS26, its geometry, monumental scale, and construction logic are examined in sharper focus, yielding silhouettes and structural details that anchor the collection’s architectural precision.
Adding a surrealist lens, the collection draws heavily on the metaphysical paintings of
Giorgio de Chirico, with Il Ritornante serving
as a central catalyst. Its muted-yet-charged palette informs the color story, while pleating, shadow-like cuts, and architectural folds echo the painting’s haunting dimensionality. Through these references, the surrealist nature of
Absent Findings unfolds more fully, creating a collection where memory, architecture, and the metaphysical merge seamlessly.
At its core, however, Early to the Party also studies the interpersonal dynamics between loved ones, those subtle, unspoken exchanges where tension and tenderness blur. The awkward pauses, overheard conversations, underhand words willfully ignored, and shifting power balances, all sparked when Singh first encountered Andy Shauf’s album The Party, which threw him off balance and prompted
a deeper examination of human interaction. These observations extend into the collection’s lookbook styling, where archetypes emerge: the Observers, the Confidants, the Dreamers, the Jesters, the Secret Keepers, the Romantics, the Ghosts, the Intruders, the Mirrors, the Collectors, the Pretenders, the Wanderers, the Flames,
the Shadows, the Archivists, the Strangers.
Each figure inhabits its own space within the gathering, embodying the complexity of what it means to be together.
Early to the Party is not just an extension of what has come before, it is an excavation
into the deeper layers of Absent Findings, its obsessions, and its evolving language of dress.
My Personal References
Spring/Summer 2025
S/S ’25 – My Personal References marks the debut collection of Absent Findings. It establishes the brand’s core values while laying the foundation for its aesthetic identity through silhouettes, color palettes, recurring motifs, and textural explorations.
The collection draws inspiration from the drape and fabrics of the sari, the modernist architecture of Le Corbusier in Chandigarh—particularly the Palace of Assembly—the poetic cinema of Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, and the meditative paintings of Vasudeo S. Gaitonde.
The muted color palette reflects the Creative Director’s upbringing in the UAE, where every hue seemed softened by a veil of dust. This subtle quality eliminates stark contrasts, creating tones that are gentle on the eye and reflective of memory, atmosphere, and lived experience.
Through these references, the debut collection defines the understated elegance and quiet strength that Absent Findings seeks to embody.
