Across centuries, womanhood has been both sanctified and condemned – women were not asked who they were, but told, confined to symbols and roles written by others.
The feminine has been sanctified and condemned — mythologised as goddess, feared as witch, idolised as mother, enthroned as monarch, exalted as muse, demonised as threat. Always held at a distance, it has carried the burden of otherness: worshipped and reviled, crowned and crucified.
Identity, then, was never singular but fractured, refracted through archetypes both imposed and imagined. It is within this shifting space that the incarnations of the 19th century Swiss medium, Helene Smith – and Erdem’s latest collection – emerge.
Smith believed she had lived three distinct lifetimes – as a monarch of the French court, an Indian princess, and a traveler among Martian skies.
Just as her trances led her to edges of her identities, overlapping in what the psychologist Theodore Flournoy called her “Romantic Cycles”, this collection is a meditation on that shifting of self, on the multiplicities and contradictions that have always haunted, shaped, and reinvented the feminine.
Embracing the contradictions of history and fantasy, reality and dream, it reflects the many facets of femininity – expressive, fluid, and never confined to a single narrative.
Each garment whispers of multiplicity: a reminder that femininity is never singular, never still, but a constellation of identities refracting across time.
Dresses are spliced with historical threadwork embroidery, two halves literally divided but combined into a whole. Ruffled masculine collars crown flowing floor length gowns. Tailored pinstripe suits are paired with elegantly bowed shoes. Draped column dresses in vivid colours are scattered with florals or metallics, embroidered with patchworks of the past and present.
Hourglass mini dresses share the catwalk with tuxedo jackets, drawstring trousers walk in the shadows of and bustier cage dresses. Antique lace is woven alongside ivory; satin flows beneath crochet; metallic threadwork gleams against hessian and cotton.
This collection is not confined to one myth or role, but revealed as a feminine paradox — expressive, enduring, and extraordinary – an eternal apparition that resists containment.
Though Smith’s selves – and these styles – suggest fragmentation, the constellation of pieces throughout this show create shimmering echoes of the strength of fragility, the sharpness of the soft. This is femininity as mosaic: scattered, refracted, endlessly reassembled, and all the more powerful for its multiplicity.
