For a designer whose artfully elegant yet undeniably sexy dresses are selling like hotcakes at Browns Focus as I type this, Emilio de la Morena’s career had a very unlikely start; Brand Consulting. Like so many other young students keen to escape the confines of their country while still funded by their parents, this writer included, Emilio went along with their choice of subject. And that’s how, after studying sculpture in his native Spain for four years and with a plan to continue into Fine Arts “as soon as I was out”, Emilio de la Morena found himself in Edinburgh, studying International Business and feeling “kind of unhappy”. He eventually moved to London to work in Brand Consulting, thinking that Art could be just a hobby. But after one too many meetings with investment banks that “wanted to spend half a million pounds on changing the name for a department” and in fear of “going mad” he quit. A few courses at St Martin’s and the London College of Fashion and working for Jonathan Saunders, made him realise; art was no hobby and fashion, from staging a fashion show to draping a piece of fabric, was It. It took a while but he got there and, what a journey!

There are quite a few people relieved that the business world did not win him over. Jemma Dyas is one. His SS09 show was one of the Browns Focus buyer’s favourites in London, “it was extremely sexy and each piece was so beautifully constructed! The collection demands to be worn by a confident sexy woman with a fierce attitude! We have been watching Emilio for a few seasons and I have always thought he was extremely talented. For SS09 the timing was perfect to bring him in, it is his best collection yet!” In fact, within two weeks of the pre-collection arriving in-store last month half of it was already gone! 

His SS09 collection is focused around the dress. For Jemma “they are easy and feminine but the full length side zips give them a tougher edge. The really great thing about them is how well priced they are for such high-quality and well-designed items.” They are already being snapped up by quite an eclectic group of women. Roisin Murphy has two; an ethereal ivory shift with what must now be Emilio’s signature folds and a more structured body-con in cobalt-blue against black. Carine Roitfeld has ordered one of the sexiest designs in the collection, in black with cut-outs and sheer panelling. And when blogger-extraordinaire Susie Bubble was invited to the “Gucci Loves NY” party earlier this year she turned to de la Morena’s AW07-08 collection for the perfect dress, as she told me “I wanted to wear something that would probably look a little out of place at a posh Gucci bash.” She chose a long-sleeve mustard jersey dress with contrasting purple mesh. For Susie “the colour combination is distinctive but it was the contrast of the mesh sculpting and the soft heavy jersey that really struck me.” It was the perfect statement dress.

The main inspiration for SS09 came from Scottish artist Eduardo Paolozzi, noted for his deconstruction of the human form. He came across his work while studying in Edinburgh, “a friend of mine used to live underneath his family and I just got interested and there are quite a few of his amazing sculptures around.” Emilio was interested “in the way he dissects his metal pieces. They are super-mechanical but I think they’re so beautiful and simple at the same time. I came across one of the images and I thought I’d really like to come back to looking at his work and it started like that.” 

With Paolozzi in mind he started to work from one piece of fabric, draping and folding it on the stand until it started shaping some resemblance of the human face transformed. “I usually work in volume but this season I wanted to make the girls look really beautiful and I wanted something quite body-conscious.” So the voluminous shapes of previous collections gave way to a more refined and streamlined silhouette, where the complexity of the ideas is found in the cut and all ornamentation has turned mechanical, with rows of small black buttons looking robotic. So much so that the final four pieces in the show “were like a window within the mechanical shape of the girl” with rows of Swarovski crystals adorning the inside layer of the dress, like a circuit board. If the direction of the design came from a Scottish artist of Italian descent, the colour palette was definitely Spanish. “I was looking into all these watercolours when I was in Spain in the summer and I think that may have influenced the way I picked the colours”, he says. The magnificent cobalt-blue that dominated the collection, and that Jemma Dyas thought as “one of the strongest of the season”, reminds him of the sky in Spain. 

With each collection he feels more confident, and Autumn-Winter 09 is his most important yet, “now that things have started to go better for us I’ve become a lot more adventurous. I feel like my next season has to be more press-worthy, I have to really push it and do the things that I really want to do. I think that’s the result of being in all those places. Sometimes it gets really hard and I think I’ll do something else but I don’t think I could do that anymore.” He’s also collaborating with Charlotte Dellal on the shoes for the collection and with the “quite striking shoe” that they’re doing it sounds worth getting excited about! 

 

If de la Morena doubts himself or what he does again he should just look around his studio, at the rails of exquisite dresses, that bright Spanish-sky cobalt-blue and a pale pink so chic Ladurée ought to make a macaroon of it, and if that’s still not enough, consider this; Carine Roitfeld, Roisin Murphy, Susie Bubble, Jemma Dyas and all the other women buying his dresses simply cannot be wrong. That’s one focus group nobody wants to mess with!