ANDREA JANKE Finest Accessories: Ultrafeminine Floral Prints by ERDEM F/W 2013/14

“I’ve always been quite afraid of the color black in my work,” said Erdem Moralioglu backstage before unveiling his ravishing collection, “but I liked the idea of doing ‘uncomfortable,’ reacting against myself, and seeing how many shades of black I could get in my show!”

So he laid black Astroturf and added a cornice of trompe l’oeil Chantilly lace to the gleaming paleness of the White Cube gallery’s Bermondsey outpost, and sent his girls out to music that included a disquieting Hitchcock thriller sound track.

Thinking of Ingmar Bergman’s noirish 1966 movie Persona, “and the idea of duality something soft mixed with something quite dark,” Moralioglu invested his collection with a cinematic quality, and cited offbeat heroines from Wednesday Addams to Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane in Psycho as inspirations.

He mixed textures, and matte and shine, with assurance and imagination, showcasing the elaborate craft for which he is famed. The show opened with charcoal tweeds woven with fronds of ostrich and strips of patent, and formal dresses and coats densely embroidered with different scale sequins to create their own shadow effects, as well as pieces in the densely layered, cutwork velvet foliate lace that Cristóbal Balenciaga loved to use in the sixties. Moralioglu’s signature ladylike dresses were spliced with bands of transparent fabric at the waist or knee to give a hint of the skin beneath and an exciting edge to their otherwise conventional propriety.

The subtle hits of citrus green, and hot or blush pink and Moralioglu’s ultrafeminine floral prints and elaborate multicolored Swiss lace carried punch as accents next to the black. “Dotted fabrics traditionally have connotations of lady and prettiness,” Moralioglu explained, so he “punched in” the spot design instead, or replicated the traditional embroidered net motif in a shining synthetic dot.

Those charming florals were subverted further still when they were perforated (to aerate a bonded satin coat, for instance), or veiled in moody dark net.

That shadowing effect worked especially well in a brace of exquisite dresses of soft pink appliqué silk roses or ostrich feathers caged beneath outer layers of diaphanous dark chiffons and organza, highlights in a collection that confirmed the strength of London as a hotbed of creative, inventive, and desirable fashion.