After the fire of his Fall collection, Erdem Moralioglu opted for a cool blue Spring. With the music from In the Mood for Love as his soundtrack, he wanted to evoke a dreamy mood, a reverie with an underlying thrum of eroticism much more subtle than his previous outing. So he imagined a young girl, perhaps the stepdaughter of last season s woman scorned, trying on adult clothes (her mother s off-the-shoulder sheath, her father s white shirt), just edging into self-awareness. This interplay between innocence and experience produced an outfit as sweet as a camisole and shorts, as worldly as a fitted knit ensemble, and as drop-dead gorgeous as a pleated floral skirt that glinted with a second skin of paillettes. And Moralioglu couldn t have found a better physical embodiment of his concept than Anais Pouliot, the model who opened and closed the show.
The actual reference he cited was Françoise Sagan s melancholic Bonjour Tristesse (the little boater in the show just the sort of hat you d imagine 17-year-old Cécile sporting in the novel). Typical of Moralioglu, that instantly added an ambiguous twist to the story he was telling with his clothes. Sagan s heroine may have been young, but she was also complicit in a grown-up tragedy. "Seen and unseen" were the designer s words to acknowledge clothes that, for all their seeming decorum, were "more undressed, more décolleté, more skin, nape, and spine" than ever before. Maximum use of Sophie Hallette s lace meant that dresses had the revealing lightness of lingerie. It reached its fullest flowering with sheer lace evening dresses lined in nude organza.
Speaking of flowers—the designer s signature—he d given tropical exotica and banal old wallpaper patterns (the second time today they provided inspiration for a collection) a "Wedgwood preciousness" by rendering them in a blue similar to the shade of the salon in which he showed in the Savoy hotel. Moralioglu s instinct for the precious is undeniably one of his greatest assets as a designer. Another is his supreme sense of control. What Fall showed is that he can subvert both those qualities to great effect while staying true to himself. Today s show was beautiful—as precious and precise as his finest work—but there was a lingering niggle that Erdem s blue Spring was possibly a little too cool. With his backstory, he d set the fuse to a powder keg. Perhaps there ll be another explosion next season.
