The Erdem’s Fall 2026 collection arrives at a significant crossroads for Erdem. Twenty years after Moralıoğlu staged his first show – a quietly defiant debut that introduced London to his unique vision of femininity – the designer has transformed the anniversary into something more meaningful than a birthday celebration. He titled the collection The Imaginary Conversation, and the title is fitting.
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| 🎂 Erdem celebrates 20 years since founding his London house in 2006 🗂️ The Fall 2026 collection reworks archival silhouettes instead of replicating them 👗 Eveningwear plays a central role, blending tulle, lace and dramatic feathered coats 🧵 Layering and patchwork emphasize memory as a design principle 👩🎨 Iconic women like Maria Callas and Radclyffe Hall inspire the collection 🎭 Glenn Close and Helen Mirren attended the London Fashion Week show |
The show took place at Somerset House during London Fashion Week, and the atmosphere reflected the collection’s theme. Moralıoğlu did not merely revisit his archives. He put them in dialogue with one another, pulling looks, silhouettes, and motifs from past seasons and reintroducing them in altered form. Gowns associated with figures like Maria Callas, Adele Astaire, and Radclyffe Hall reappeared, but not as replicas. The cut had shifted, the fabric had changed, or new embroidery had been applied where bare cloth once sat. The result was something close to a living wardrobe – the kind of closet that accumulates meaning over time rather than losing it.
The eveningwear carried particular weight. A black-and-ivory tulle gown appeared with a dotted veil draped over the face, referencing the past without surrendering to it entirely. A blush-pink lace dress followed, offering a softer presence until black, branch-like embroideries climbed across the bodice and asserted their authority. Next came a monumental, pale, voluminous feathered coat that moved with confidence and defied restraint.
Layering was central to the collection’s design. Pieces were patchworked together. Garments were held against one another as though the designer were physically weighing their relationship. Draped and structured pieces coexisted on the same body. Moralıoğlu has always worked this way, but here, his approach felt less like a technique and more like an argument—an insistence that clothing carries memory and that memory compounds.
Moralıoğlu founded his London-based fashion house in 2006, and the anniversary collection emphasizes that fact. A bridal dress from the inaugural show returned to the runway, its gathered skirts voluminous and charged with a particular kind of defiance. Wearing something from two decades ago that has been transformed yet remains recognizable is one of the more honest things a designer can do on a milestone occasion. There was no pretense that the house had simply moved on.
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The women who have influenced Moralıoğlu’s work have never been mere decorative references. He chooses them because they resist easy categorization: writers who admired athletes; scientists overlooked by their era; and aristocrats with complicated inner lives. What holds them together, he has suggested, is curiosity and an unwillingness to be reduced to a single definition. The Fall 2026 collection built on this idea. These were not costumes. They were arguments about how women occupy space in time and cloth.
Glenn Close and Helen Mirren attended the show, and their presence was no coincidence. They are women who have spent decades being defined and redefined by an industry that rarely offers that privilege without demanding something in return. Seated at a Moralıoğlu show celebrating twenty years of precisely the kind of women his clothes are built around, Close and Mirren became part of what the collection was saying without saying a word.
