de Polder - 2025 capsule collection - documented in Eemnes, NL
If you want to get to know The Netherlands, visit a polder. Every meter is deliberate. A polder is not a landscape, it is an act. Man-made ground taken from the sea by people who refused to move uphill. The lines are geometric. The space is strict. It feels less like nature, but more like a domesticated imitation of it.
Spend enough time there and you start to feel something unusual. A sense of ownership. Not just over land, but over the rules that make land behave. The Dutch call that engineering. Others might call it confidence. The result is a clear sense of entitlement. When the ground listens to you long enough, you begin to think everyone should. You might even plant an upside-down Dutch flag in your field to show the world you feel that way.
Some call the polder calm. Some feel its safety. The recognisable rules it provides to live by. But this has another side. Order can be comforting until it becomes total. When sameness becomes the default, otherness starts to feel like a threat. A friend once said that gardening is fascism, period. See your well-kept garden blossom and you taste a certain power. Flatten kilometers of sea and you live in the aftertaste.
Seen from that angle, a polder begins to look like the Fourth Reich. A soft and muddy one. A Reich made of clay, spreadsheets and the behavior expected from pious citizens who take pride in keeping things tidy. It does not shout. It drains water at a steady pace. It tends the land once reclaimed from the moods of Poseidon. It simply keeps everything in line. Horizontal forever.
If you ask us, visitors are what save it. The uninvited flowers and plants. The birds who forget their flight plan. The fox that crosses the perfect ditch. Even the stray human who arrives with curiosity or a bad sense of direction. These intruders bring the life the engineers and politicians forgot to budget for (we are looking at you, Cornelis Lely). They break the grid in ways the locals sometimes cannot. The locals are good stewards, but they are too disciplined by nature. Same as everyone who came before them living there. They keep the place alive but rarely let it misbehave.
Visitors do. Visitors have the power to introduce chaos. Visitors remind the land what unexpected feels like. They stay briefly, then move on, and still manage to make the place better. The polder needs people who can enjoy it without owning it. People who can admire the control without falling in love with the idea of controlling everything. People who bring a little disorder and leave before it can be cleaned up.
We too were visitors. First in concept, when the project first sparked, finding inspiration in a part of The Netherlands that John, born in South-Korea and now based in Amsterdam, had yet to explore with his Dutch-inspired label de dam foundation. Second, by asking Lennard, who has actual roots in the thick clay, having grown up in the capital of the Dutch polder province of Flevoland but who left it many years ago, to revisit it and add his vision of a lone walker on the plains.
Finally, we took the finished trench coat and cap into the terrain that inspired them, capturing the campaign on muddy ground that was once only an idea and is now the arena where our favorite Belgian actor Mistral Guidotti brings it to life. Some of the locals were curious, some indifferent, and one dog, described by its owner as man-eating, made it clear we were not entirely welcome.
That is when we truly learned about the paradox of the polder. The terror is part of the beauty. The interruptions are part of the cure. You stand there and feel the invisible undercurrent of the sea below your feet. You feel the heavy sky pressing down on your head. You feel history, engineering, fear and pride stitched into the same square of land. You realize you are walking across a national neurosis. A place that proves control is possible and also proves control always has a cost.
A place silently waiting for a bird, a fox, a passing heron, a careless insect, or even a dwelling wanderer to crack its perfect surface and reveal its truer beauty.
Credits
Concept, Creative Direction: Another (Joachim Baan, Christoph van Veghel)
Design, Product Development, Co-Creative Direction: de dam foundation
Artwork, Product Development, Co-Creative Direction: Lennard Kok
Film: Milan van Dril
Photography: Joachim Baan
Music: De Rivier
Talent & Model: Mistral Guidotti (187cm)