Erdem

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LONDON, September 18, 2008

By Sarah Mower

"I just wanted something soft and hyper-romantic, easy but a bit surreal at the same time," said Erdem Moralioglu backstage. "I've got all these images of seventies theater productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Eton boys wearing flowers in their boaters."

Whatever inspired him to push for all-out prettiness, and design a stunning lineup of dresses in French lace and dappled pastel-tinted watercolors of anemones and irises, it's clear things are working more brilliantly for Erdem every season. Take a tiered ice-blue lace Edwardiana dress with an orange ribbon clashingly threaded through it, or a sugar-pink high-necked organdy number with a 3-D smothering of "a hundred hydrangea petals in the bodice." The clothes, which also included a delicately washed-out pale blue ghost of toile de Jouy and almost sculptural zones of richly encrusted jeweled and frilled embroideries on sleeves and in deep hemlines, were breathtaking in movement. They made for a spellbinding show by an exceptional talent whose self-taught standards of workmanship almost put his creations on an equal footing with some of the things seen in haute couture.