Dramatic dresses: the Saltburn effect hits London fashion week
It’s official: the Saltburn effect has hit London fashion week. Saturday’s catwalk shows by Erdem and Simone Rocha were peppered with dramatic tulle dresses and elbow-length leather gloves that looked as if they had been fetched straight out of the wardrobe of Elspeth Catton, the eccentric matriarch played by Rosamund Pike in Emerald Fennell’s perverse social satire film.
It is Pike and her fellow doyens of the film industry rather than Gen Z influencers who are dominating the front row this season.
At Erdem Moralıoğlu’s show, held at the British Museum, the actors Kristin Scott Thomas and Ruth Wilson were guests of honour. The catwalk was staged in front of the Parthenon marbles – the fifth-century BC masterpieces that sparked Rishi Sunak’s recent diplomatic “blunder”. Moralıoğlu, whose collection was inspired by the American-born Greek soprano Maria Callas, said he had chosen the location to reflect how Callas had been “uprooted”. A booklet of images and notes left on each guest’s seat highlighted how, for Callas, “the absence of home was poignant and profound”.
Moralıoğlu homed in on Callas’s career-defining 1953 performance of Medea. Red paint was hand-daubed over a delicate floral-printed taffeta fit and flare floral bralette and matching skirt, echoing the painted costumes Callas wore to play the sorceress of Greek mythology. Marabou feather opera coats that almost bounced down the catwalk and “cocktail pyjama sets” embroidered with broken crystals were pieces Moralıoğlu imagined Callas would have worn post-performance – but one could also equally envisage them at a Saltburn-themed raucous party.
Meanwhile, after her hugely successful guest spot on Jean Paul Gaultier’s haute couture Paris catwalk last month, Simone Rocha’s evening London slot drew an even larger crowd than usual, including the actors Andrew Scott and Douglas Booth and the TV star Alexa Chung.
Models wove their way around the pews of the city’s oldest surviving church, St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield, as a lingering smell of incense from its thurible filled the air.
Rocha called the collection, entitled The Wake, “the final piece of a triptych”. The Irish-born designer continued her exploration of corsetry using her learnings from her stint with the corset maestro Gaultier (the mastermind behind Madonna’s 1990 pink conical bra). “I loved what we did in Paris, so it was nice to almost contaminate it and explore what that proposition would look like in ready-to-wear,” Rocha said backstage.
Her starting point was an exploration of the underpinnings of Queen Victoria’s mourning dress, worn by the monarch after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861 until her own death in 1901. It was the bodice’s gentle boning and accompanying undergarments that captured Rocha’s attention.
There was a deliberate crossover between Rocha and Gaultier’s shared “love of the breast and the hip and the female form”. However, this time instead of corsets cupping the body, Rocha wanted them to appear as if “floating”. Some were placed into fragile fabrics including tulle and organza, others added a soft rather than defined shape to oversized silhouettes. “It made them sensual in a way that wasn’t so overtly provocative,” Rocha said.
Earrings made from human hair gave a nod to traditional Victorian mementoes, while some models carried fuzzy lamb-shaped bags “to balance the slightly more grownup elements”. Bedazzled platform Crocs also added a playful and practical touch.