February 23, 2026 |
Celebrating 20 years in business, Erdem is a beacon of independent success in London. He has survived and thrived. For this anniversary collection, he imagined what would happen if the many exceptional women who have inspired his collections over the decades were in conversation (everyone from Maria Callas and Radcliffe Hall to Margot Fonteyn, the Duchess of Devonshire and Virginia Woolf). Erdem envisaged a cross pollination of his past concepts and ideas. This 20th anniversary collection was not a retrospective, he insisted. Instead it was a remix of favourite fabrics, silhouettes and details – recognisably Erdem, but also new. So the top half of an 2018 evening dress was hacked off and put with jeans for 2026 – a styling idea that originally came from his graduate collection. The top half of a floral jacquard car coat was collaged with the bottom half of a silk dressing gown. Several dresses were made from artfully patchworked fragments of different fabrics and design details as Erdem sampled freely from his own extensive archive. Monochrome tweed fabric from past collections was shredded and tuned into feather-like dresses, swatches of intense embroidery were repurposed into dazzling patchwork gowns. A moody AW09 print was transformed into a puff-ball mini dress with a high, Elizabethan ruff collar, worthy of Orlando. There were plenty of swoonsomely pretty pieces, from the rose-print, full-skirted drop waist ball skirts (which came with handy pockets) to ribbon embellished party dresses, tailoring veiled on delicate lace and a spectacular shredded silk car coat. Add a ‘feather duster’ slipper and step out, Erdem-style.
Photography courtesy of Erdem.
