The consistency of Ece Ege’s Dice Kayek collections is remarkable. She never wavers from the concise, pristine shapes she favors—not that they lack imagination or a subtly abrasive sense of humor. When asked for her inspiration, she usually gets slightly annoyed; she doesn’t revert to muses or elaborate mood boards. “I get inspired by people, how they live today; it’s very contemporary,” she said, brushing off the question. But for Pre-Fall, she did have a very personal memory in mind: the uniform she wore when she attended private primary school in the Turkish city of Bursa, where she’s from.
To elucidate the point, she sketched it on a piece of paper: a delightful pinafore in black-and-white cotton vichy with a ruched little skirt, a starched white shirt, and a red satin bow at the collar. Its almost archetypal feminine shape was the template for the collection’s silhouette, rendered with Ege’s succinct neatness and gracing an elegant daywear wardrobe. “It’s soigné; it’s not casual!” she said in mock horror.
The designer riffed on her beloved sculptural volumes and shapes; exact tailoring and geometric cuts were sustained by the consistency of high-quality Made in Italy fabrications, which helped define the contoured lines of short wool trapeze coats or abbreviated flounced jackets, worn with doll-like ruched miniskirts. A play of textures between pied-de-poule and pied-de-coq patterns added a touch of Parisian chic, as in a razor-sharp tailored pantsuit with an hourglass-cut blazer, or in a schoolteacher-pleated midi skirt paired with a graphic logoed wool sweater.
The rigorous approach to substantial volumes peaked in Ege’s version of the classic trenchcoat that every French woman keeps in her wardrobe. It was cut imaginatively with precise couture-ish folded sleeves and mismatched buttons. The waterproof fabric was so thick that Ege called it the cardboard trench. It could have stood upright by itself in the Paris rain.
