Erdem’s pre-fall collection, filled with delicate, painterly lines, 3D flower embellishments and crumpled fabrics, was the fruit of a collaboration with the artist Kaye Donachie, whose portraits of 20th-century female creatives have a soft-focus, dreamy feel.
It was also a departure for designer Erdem Moralioglu, who usually works on his own and draws inspiration from the lives of creative women from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Why collaborate? “Kaye’s work spoke to me,” said the designer, who knew Donachie from the Royal College of Art and who had previously commissioned her to create a portrait of his late mother as a young woman.
“Kaye’s portraits feel like a ghost of something. They’re not real in a way,” said the designer, who turned Donachie’s original line drawings into prints, embroideries and embellishments across this lavish collection with a bohemian edge.
Lush fabric rosettes with long, streaming ribbons were pinned to sleek overcoats, sculptural jackets and midi dresses.
Other flowers, on long crinkled dresses and sheer mohair sweaters, looked as if they were drawn with a black felt-tip pen. A short, cable-knit cardigan had a needle-punch flower that resembled a corsage.
Dresses, skirts — and even a trench — were awash in multiple shades of pink or covered in smudgy blue ink designs; paintings of pink roses, and watery, abstracted toile de jouy patterns.
Silhouettes were sculptural — but not so strict. Moralioglu worked with a shrunken technical satin, which gave the clothes a crinkled surface and a less formal feel, while sheer skirts and tops showcased structured bras and tap shorts underneath.
Flowers also blossomed across the new handbag collection, with curving brass tulips serving as handles on Erdem’s new — and growing — collection of Bloom bags.
The business is growing alongside those blooms, despite hard times for luxury. The brand will open its second store in Seoul in March, and is doing a prelaunch of the new bag collection with Mytheresa early next year.
