Erdem Moralioglu s twin sister, Sara, makes TV documentaries about geography and natural history. He s been looking at her films, watching the survival movie Alive, and thinking, he said, "about Picnic at Hanging Rock: girls surviving on the mountain. Elegantly, sort of." Moralioglu quotes these sorts of sources with a wry smile, in the full knowledge that they re pure fashion whimsy. In practical terms, what it meant was he d come up with an autumnal palette of brown, ocher, teal, rust, and tan for his prints and coats, and a gray as dirty as a leaden November sky for a lace dress.
The thing about being a designer of pretty dresses is that it takes something a little odd to keep it young and just left of conventional. Sometimes, with Erdem, it s an overload of sweetness, embroidery, and froth that does it. In this case, it was the color, slightly off and more somber than usual. Though most of the shapes—Moralioglu s familiar short, stiffly belled skirts and high-necked long gowns—stayed the same, the effects worked well here and there. A cloudy gray tulle dress with bird appliqués and a yellow silk number, its puffed sleeves vertically patterned with autumn leaves, had the kind of slightly weird aura that would turn heads at a cocktail party; and all the long finale dresses had Moralioglu s signature delicate romance about them. Otherwise, with an eye to the fact that this was an outdoorsy collection, he added a few coats to keep his girls warm in the woods. A neat camel trench with a shearling-lined hood had members of the audience planning personal orders as they struggled out into the rain-swept London streets.
