An Ethereal Outing, as Art Meets Artisan at Erdem
Review of Erdem Fall 2025 Fashion Show
By Angela Baidoo
THE COLLECTION
THE VIBE
Poetic Licence, Emotive Exploration, Merged Mediums
Backstage following today’s show Erdem Moralıoğlu noted that it is not often that designers get to collaborate with artists while they are still here, telling The Impression “I had always wanted to do a collaboration with [Kaye Donachie] and it was the first time I had ever done a collaboration with an artist, and actually to make a collection with someone (an artist) who is alive”. For fall it was contemporary Scottish painter Kaye Donachie who had her work immortalised in a new medium( i.e. fabric), with the designer choosing to reconnect with the artist who he had studied with at the RCA and who he had commissioned five years ago to create a portrait of his late mother.
So a highly personal and emotional outing for the designer whose collection brought Donachie’s ethereal renderings to life. Mirroring her technique of almost abstracting the images of her subject, a bandeau dress in wispy organza appeared to do the same as it mimicked the ‘ghost’ of a dress. Her muted brushstrokes depicting scenes of domesticity were also recreated in hand-shredded lace across the skirt and bodices of sculpted dresses – a painstakingly methodical technique which the designer spoke to after the show “There were interpretations that were quite literal, so we were in the studio re-creating one of the preparatory sketches for Look 1 [where] we used 200 pieces of organza to make up the face”.
The artistic technique used by Donachie evokes dreamlike scenes that are less like literal studies. In some cases the subjects appear blurred, like they were viewed through a veil, meaning the viewer captures only a hint of what lies beneath rather than an actual likeness, as if the artist intended to capture an aura or feeling over reality. In studying her work for this collection there was also a loosening of structures and blurring of lines (i.e. seams). As was seen for spring 2025, where drop-waist flapper style silhouettes appeared among the designers – as he referred to them when discussing the collection backstage with The Impression – “cookie cutter” shapes of the feminine, Erdems dresses were even more fluid this season as he said in today’s show notes “The collection is formed of archetypal feminine silhouettes against which the ethereality of Kaye’s artworks and their evocative palette is juxtaposed and amplified.” Minus the embellishments which accompanied his designs for spring, here his column dresses came in technical organza with a Kaye Doanchie portrait print, the construction of which appeared as if a simple oversized square (the perfect canvas for the artists work) sewn with a single stitch at the back leaving the edges loose so they billowed behind the models, referencing the dream-like quality of the artists work, and a new direction for the designer.
THE DIRECTION
THE QUOTE
There was a lot of exploration of simple fabrics such as cotton, bonding it with neoprene to create the silhouettes… and the burgundy dress covered in flowers was created by stretching out jersey, laser-cutting into it, embroidering it, letting it shrink back, and then bonding it onto neoprene, so there were a lot of technical things. It was as technical as it was analogue, just like the painting onto simple fabrics like cotton.”
Erdem Moralıoğlu, Creative Director, Erdem
THE WRAP UP
Speaking backstage the designer spoke to the fact that in researching and then applying the work of Donachie to todays collection he was able to express her work in a new way, saying “Her method is so painterly so it was quite interesting to have iterations of it on sheer organza or to interpret it as a collage, [we took] those paintings and transformed them through another lens”, and in this reinterpretation Erdem’s body of work is itself going through its own transformation, as what we once knew him for is slowly shifting each season to include less literal versions of the female form, while still retaining the essence of the house. As the designer doesn’t do things by halves when it comes to deep-diving into his varying historical source materials it is gong to be interesting to anticipate what he will evoke for the Erdem woman next.
