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.
