Deadwood SS25 Leaving the Dark City

Kevin Murphy Global Sessions Manager Massimo Morelli captures a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel feeling for the label’s Spring/Summer 2025 presentation, Leaving the Dark City.

“Before I even talked about hair and anything related to my job, I asked [Felix von Bahder], so, what is the message? What is your idea? What is your inspiration for the collection?”

If you look up Kowloon Walled City, a now demolished neighbourhood in Hong Kong that translates from Cantonese to “The City of Darkness,” you’ll find yourself squinting and turning your head to make sense of the densely populated area. With buildings built almost on top of one another in a mishmash of design styles fighting for breathing room, bricks, concrete, and cast-iron seemingly wield into one structure — with wires and cables tying them together with a bow. It is easy to imagine how little daylight the city got, as residents navigated their way through a labyrinth of narrow alleyways and tunnels.

This is what Kevin Murphy Global Sessions Manager Massimo Morelli saw when he embarked on his debut collaboration with Deadwood co-founders Carl Ollson and Felix von Bahder for their SS25 Copenhagen Fashion Week presentation, Leaving the Dark City. Known for their experimental design and up-cycling techniques, the Stockholm-based brand has built a strong visual identity since 2012, merging nostalgia-infused grunge elements with innovative materials — looking back to prepare for the future.

And this season, the future is looking bright. Drawing from the resilience of the Kowloon Walled City residents and, more generally, the idea that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, Deadwood explores the mental mazes we deal with on the daily — and the challenges we face to find our way out of the darkness within our own minds. Seeking the beauty in the mundane and celebrating the act of building yourself back up after hardship, the collection uses recycled, repurposed, and leftover materials to create fresh pieces, reminding us that we have all we need within us to start anew.

“He said, in a nutshell, that he’s just been through some tough times. He’s been in a dark place. So he wanted to think about that rough moment and give hope to see the light outside of the tunnel.” Morelli explains that, while dealing with this challenging time, von Bahder stumbled across a documentary on Kowloon Walled City. As Morelli looked at the same visuals, he pulled out keywords — punk, dusty, industrial — and designed the hair to bring those concepts to life and drive home the core message and grit of the collection. “All the hair that you see, it comes out of that feeling. They all come from the same world.”

Complimenting the subdued hues of the collection, which pairs olive greens, navy blues, soft beiges, and black and white with accents of red, the hair styles drive home the resilience and fight embedded within the fabrics, seams, and stitches. Braids clipped up with bottlecaps, slept-in up-does, and slightly messy, windswept half-up half-downs, the looks feel like waking up from a bad dream to the realisation that you’ve made it out alive. Walking through a dark night, dodging battle after battle, the models emerge on the cobblestone runway in the daylight of a Wednesday morning tougher and clearer-minded, with looks that demand our attention and make sure we know that they’ve come out the other side.

Take a look…