Loose Threads: Erdem’s occult couture
ERDEM’s Spring/Summer 2026 collection is inspired by the late 19th-century mystic Helene Smith, whose seances transported her to three cycles of past lives. A central theme ran through them like a loose thread: women whose lives were characterised by turmoil, controversy, and violently tragic ends. The collection takes thematic cues from Smith’s many lives, actualised in the clothing, both in details such as embroidered symbols from Smith’s Martian language and in an overall sartorial syntax of disrupted femininity. As Erdem Moralioglu has articulated in interviews, he has a penchant for exploring contrasts. In the midst of a collection and label that are often the epitome of high-femme romanticism, with prêt-à-porter lines dominated by floral dresses, this collection introduces a heightened sense of tension. Amongst caned corset dresses, striped pyjama suits flowed down the runway, followed by a Kelly green satin dressing robe embroidered with shimmering asymmetric patterns.
Smith’s past-life narratives, too, unfold like a triptych. The first was a “royal cycle,” where she was Marie-Antoinette. This was followed by a “Hindoo cycle,” where she channelled Princess Simandini, the favourite 11th wife of Prince Sivrouka, who burned herself alive on his funerary pyre. The third, and perhaps the most visually generative for this collection, was the “Martian cycle.” Guided by Cagliostro, Smith claimed to travel to Mars, cataloguing its inhabitants, their rituals, and their language. From these visions, she produced a suite of artworks, botanical studies of imagined alien flora among them, several of which appear in ERDEM’s collection, translated into embroidery placed across the breast of a button-up shirt, and covering a black blazer in glistening diamond-toned patterns.
One white dress, printed with black botanicals, Martian symbols, and geometric blueprint-like sketches, encapsulated the collection’s conceptual core. The effect is a visualisation of dissonances, which somehow come together into harmony: a simple, elegant silhouette in an interplay with a print that feels like the sketchbook of a mad genius. The tan leather belt, styled over a white fragment of corsetry, has the vague feel of a straitjacket strap. Moralioğlu’s gesture towards a woman like Smith, considered part genius and part dissident, belongs to a spectre of women through the ages who were shunned or persecuted for expressing a connection to what Ursula K. Le Guin calls “the language of the night.” That is, the shadowy underworld of our dreams, intuition, and the unconscious, and their expressions in the material world.
In line with the unruly women inspiring this collection, the single drop-pearl earring accenting a good portion of the looks seems to take inspiration from Mary Queen of Scots, the movie. While there is no historical evidence that the veritable woman wore this mismatched earring with a drop pearl on one ear and many hoops on the other, it feels quite sentimentally accurate, expressing a confident punk attitude or refusal to conform. While Mary’s tragic end at the executioner’s block was mainly due to political machinations, her legacy remains that of a woman who defied the roles imposed upon her. The raw hems and loose threads hanging from silk and crocheted dresses extend this spirit of rebellion. One entirely crocheted dress looks like a collection of doilies sewn together, topped with a ruffled lace stand collar, 4 which also appears on many other looks in the collection. This understated take on the Medici collar, whose Renaissance origins declare power and prestige, has an upright face-framing architecture.
Many sleeves are accented with a tarot card-like appliqué, deepening the collection’s occult atmosphere. In one, black eyes on a white frame weep long, loose threads down the hem of the sleeve. It retraces one of Smith’s painted series, entitled The Materialisation of the Girl of Jairus, in which the face of a woman slowly takes shape, with features appearing over the course of seven frames. Smith’s influence on the Surrealists is well documented: when Victor Brauner created a tarot deck entitled the Marseille Game, he featured Smith among Freud, Marquis de Sade, and Baudelaire. The aim was to deconstruct the bourgeois nature of playing cards, introducing a new, liberated design that reflected their values. In the collection, too, the connotations of many pieces are inverted: a simple mesh grocery shopping bag becomes couture as it glistens in embroidered sequins on the arm of a model clad in pink silk chiffon.
In ERDEM’s own words, the collection represents the “many facets of femininity – expressive, fluid, and never confined to one narrative.” This idea that women can reinvent themselves over and over again throughout their lives becomes a guiding needle, mirroring Smith’s own metamorphic voyages through identity, language, and time. Highly structured mini and maxi dresses with panniers laced down the front remind one of the work of contemporary designer Zoe Gustavia Anna Whalen, who similarly mobilises historical silhouettes to probe proportion, containment, and the sculptural possibilities of the body.
The modular history of dress offers an illuminating parallel. In earlier centuries, a single ensemble was never a singular garment but an assemblage of components: corset, chemise, skirt, stomacher, fichu – each added or removed to recalibrate silhouette, propriety, and persona. Even in the 19th century, layers such as detachable collars, cuffs, and aprons allowed women to shift roles and appearances throughout the day. ERDEM’s collection nods to this heritage of assemblage: a reminder that dressing has always been an act of selective composition. In this collection, elements can be taken up or set aside. A pyjama- stripe suit softens the severity of a corseted dress, or a satin robe disrupts the formality of a structured silhouette, allowing the wearer to move between feminine, elegant, playful, or youthful registers with ease. It suggests that identity, like dress, is something built piece by piece: a fluid constellation of energies and personas that can coexist within a single collection.
Ultimately, for Erdem Moralioglu, design is a negotiation of proportion, colour, and form: a process of making something work for a woman’s body. In S/S26, that process becomes a metaphor for reinvention itself. A continual re-lacing, re-layering, and re-imagining of who one might become takes place through a coherent yet dynamic collection.
Written by Liz McLellan
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All images: Erdem Spring/Summer 2026 collection.