Samuel Davids' Past Future Lovers: A Nostalgia for a Memory That Never Happened

There are memories we carry because they happened, and then there are memories that exist somewhere between imagination and reality. They belong to moments we have never lived but can somehow still feel nostalgic for. It is within this strange space that Belgian independent designer Samuel Davids develops Past Future Lovers, an editorial exploring suppressed memories, imagined futures and the emotional relationship between the two.

Based in Belgium, Davids uses fashion as a form of self-dialogue and introspection. His work is rooted in tailoring while moving between poetry, painting and film, creating a practice where clothing becomes a way of exploring personal thoughts and experiences.

For Past Future Lovers, that exploration began with a feeling of time displacement.

While imagining future events in his life, Davids found himself repeatedly seeing those moments alongside someone from his past. The future was therefore being imagined through the presence of something that had already happened. It created a feeling that he describes as nostalgia for a memory that never happened.

Rather than treating this feeling as something purely abstract, Davids allowed it to enter the design process.

At the same time, he was preparing for his sister's wedding and working on his mother's wedding dress, repairing and resizing the garment for the occasion. The dress already carried its own history. It had belonged to his mother and was connected to an important moment in his family's past. Now, through the act of altering it for his sister, the garment was becoming part of another future memory.

This connection between generations became central to the project.

Working with the dress also gave Davids a way to express how proud he was of both his sister and his mother. The garment became more than an item of clothing. It became a physical meeting point between different moments in time — his mother's past, his sister's future, and his own emotional reflections in the present.

The resulting figure is an obscured bride, draped in a veil.

There is something intentionally distant about the image. Rather than presenting the bride as a straightforward symbol of celebration, Davids places her behind a layer that conceals and protects her. The veil creates a sense of separation between the figure and the viewer, suggesting something that can be seen but not completely reached.

For Davids, this image connects to the idea of a flower encased in glass. The flower is preserved to maintain its beauty indefinitely, just as he was attempting to protect certain feelings and make them last.

This idea of preservation runs throughout Past Future Lovers. The project is not simply concerned with looking backwards. Instead, it considers how the past can enter our imagination of what has not yet happened. A future can carry the emotional weight of a memory before it becomes reality, while an old relationship can continue to appear inside moments that have yet to arrive.

Shot in Brussels, Belgium, the editorial translates that internal experience into a visual language built around clothing, concealment and emotional symbolism.

At the centre of the project is also Davids' approach to fashion itself. His practice uses clothing as a medium for self-reflection, allowing personal experiences to inform the way garments are imagined and constructed. In Past Future Lovers, tailoring becomes closely connected to memory: the physical act of working with an existing wedding dress mirrors the emotional act of revisiting what came before while imagining what comes next.

The result is a story that feels intimate without needing to explain every emotion directly.

Past Future Lovers asks us to consider the memories we create in our minds, the people who remain present in our imagined futures, and the strange feeling of missing something that never happened.

For Samuel Davids, fashion becomes a way of giving that feeling a physical form.

His eponymous label is set to launch its debut collection in early 2027, continuing a practice grounded in tailoring and shaped by his dialogue with poetry, painting and film.

For now, Past Future Lovers leaves us with an image that feels suspended in time: a bride behind a veil, a dress carrying generations of meaning, and a feeling preserved somewhere between the past and the future.