February 21, 2017 |
Erdem’s AW17 collection began, apparently, with an imagined meeting between his two grandmothers. Which was a nice place to start. Ahhh, grandmas. Particularly interesting for the designer, though, considering one grandmother was English, the other Turkish. Think of this, then, as a sort of melange of the designer’s British and Turkish heritage. Starting with a sprinkling of the Middle East that came through in the rich, kaleidoscopic fabrications and almost folksy feel. A sort of play on traditional Turkish dress. Not that we profess to be experts, but that’s what we were getting. Especially from those first looks. It was something about the ways the dresses twisted up around the neck and fastened with tiny buttons, like the ones that sit on the backs of wedding dresses, and finished with tassels that sat along the hemline. It was met by a sense Britishness, which was imagined with a kind of prim, 1940s femininity, a silhouette that high on the neckline, slim on the waist and finished, sensibly, at the ankle, rendered in a patchwork of wallpaper-esque, or should that be curtain-esque, fabrics. The bows that fastened across the chest added to this feel, so too the dresses that touched on the Victorian nightgown. The collection ended, as all good things should, with sequins. Were those last dresses not a bit of a disco? Something about the combination of a sequin and a billowing sleeve says so. Because sometimes even a grandma needs to let her hair down.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
