There’s an an eerie quality about some of the photographs in Erdem Moralioglu’s Pre-Fall lookbook, something about the models, who seem to hover almost like apparitions caught between day and dusk as the colors of their long dresses blaze in the last of the autumnal light. They were shot amid the rocks and standing on the bridge over the pond in the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park in west London. It gave the designer the ideal location to conjure up the spirit of his twin themes of the season. “I’d been thinking about Laura Ashley and Japanese artist Hokusai,” he said. “There was an exhibition about Hokusai at the British Museum recently, and then there is something I love about Laura Ashley.”
It’s an odd coming together of influences, but the outcomes visibly land within Erdem’s domain of romanticism. Ashley’s influence—the high-waisted bodices, the English peasant-y flower prints, the patchwork and quilting—perfectly connects him with the bucolic-escapist Victoriana phase of the early ’70s, at which he excels. A trio of girls in blue printed “maxis” (as they were called back in the day) look like a very sophisticated set of Holly Hobbies, but no less magnetic for that. One wraith, standing alone, vies for the title of the best dress of this Erdem season: a long column of creamy charmeuse, with black lace trimming around a huge inverted triangular collar. (Should anyone be looking to dress a Karen Carpenter biopic, this would do nicely.)
Where does the à la Japonais come in? In the tiny, formal flower prints, the chrysanthemum cloque fabric, the hint of kimono sashes, and the embroideries of birds flying over the hem of a trenchcoat. But who’s really counting? Just as apparent is the not-difficult-to-spot continuation of his fascination with the life of the young Queen Elizabeth II. Keeping on with the slightly ’40s silhouettes, with their draped satin shoulder lines or sequined puffed sleeves (which Wallis Simpson would have adored) and the circle-skirted ’50s silhouettes, was another wise move.
