Photographer Angela Ibañez takes us backstage at Dreaming Eli’s Spring/Summer 2027 show, where childhood memories, faded romances and the messy business of growing up collide. Under designer Elisa Trombatore’s gaze, nostalgia gets ripped apart, stitched back together and dressed for a night out in London.
Some dreams refuse to leave quietly. They linger in old photographs, in the lace curtains of a childhood home, in the things we carry without even realising we’re carrying them. For Spring/Summer 2027, Dreaming Eli turns these ghosts into a wardrobe, exploring what happens when the worlds we imagined as children crash into the realities we inherit as adults.
Titled Dreamers in Exile, the collection moves between two places that feel worlds apart: the intimacy of Sicily, with its family rituals, domestic objects and inherited traditions, and the restless energy of London, where identity becomes something to question, shed and rebuild. It is a story about growing up, but not necessarily growing out of things. Because leaving home doesn’t mean leaving everything behind.
Founded by Elisa Trombatore in 2021 after her MA at Central Saint Martins, Dreaming Eli has always found beauty in contradiction. Here, innocence meets desire, romance gets tangled up with disillusionment, and femininity is allowed to be as delicate as it is dangerous. Each look feels like a character in a story we have somehow lived before, moving through different stages of becoming: from the tenderness of childhood to the freedom, confusion and resistance of adulthood.
Visually, SS27 looks like a memory slowly coming undone. Trombatore pushes the label’s signature distressing techniques further, breaking down silk, layering cotton and gauze, and bringing together blush pink, dusty rose and white with sharper flashes of black. Hand-painted fabrics take on the texture of something inherited and worn for years, while ruffles and pearls evoke old photographs pieced together, each fragment holding a different version of who we used to be.
There is something deliciously imperfect about it all. Lace is ripped and cut by hand, revealing the layers beneath. Denim, lace and vinyl collide in unexpected combinations, creating surfaces that seem to melt away and expose what lies underneath. New screen prints draw on the ornamentation of Sicilian Baroque churches and the visual language of tribal-inspired tattoos, bringing together two seemingly distant worlds: the sacred and the personal, the inherited and the chosen.
The body itself becomes an archive. Tattoos resemble scars, each one a reminder of what has been lost, survived or carried forward. In London, the dreamer becomes a wanderer, caught in the city’s perpetual movement and the fleeting possibility of becoming someone else after dark. But transformation is never quite as clean as we might hope. We are made of the things we leave behind, too.
Accessories continue the conversation between fantasy and reality. Dreaming Eli’s signature Wild Hearts Bleed platform heels return in a satin finish, now in blush and rose, while the refined New Pearl 3D bag range, developed with Harry Mack and engineered by experiential production studio Unit9, adds another layer of otherworldly texture to the collection.
Yet beneath the distressed fabrics, romantic details and darker undertones, there is something surprisingly hopeful. Dreamers in Exile doesn’t ask us to choose between the past and the person we are becoming. Instead, it embraces the friction between them. Memories change shape. Dreams get bruised. The things that once defined us begin to feel unfamiliar, and somewhere in that uncomfortable space, something new takes form.
Perhaps growing up is less about finding out who you are than learning to live with all the versions of yourself that came before. Dreaming Eli’s SS27 collection makes a beautiful, slightly heartbreaking case for exactly that. Because some dreams are never meant to come true exactly as we imagined them. Sometimes, they have to break a little first.
Photography by Ángela Ibañez for VEIN MAGAZINE
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