Dreaming Eli SS27 Reassembles Memory in ‘Dreamers in Exile’

Dreaming Eli’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection, Dreamers in Exile, approaches memory not as something to preserve intact, but as material that can be cut apart, layered and reconstructed. Elisa Trombatore’s label moves between an idealised childhood in Sicily and adulthood in London, translating that distance into distressed silks, cotton and gauze, hand-painted surfaces, screen printing and deliberately exposed layers. The result is a collection in which construction and narrative are closely connected: garments carry the idea of a past that remains visible even after it has been altered.

From Sicily to London

Sicily forms the starting point of Dreamers in Exile. The collection draws on inherited traditions, old photographs, domestic objects and what the brand describes as the intimate traces of home. Yet the reference is not presented simply as nostalgia. Dreaming Eli considers how the rituals that create belonging can also establish boundaries, and how distance changes the way childhood and family histories are understood.

London represents the next stage of that story. In the collection narrative, adulthood introduces speed, ambition and the possibility of remaking identity away from home. Trombatore frames this transition through a series of characters associated with innocence, desire, disillusionment, resistance and renewal. Rather than suggesting that adulthood replaces what came before, the collection treats identity as an accumulation of fragments: carried forward, rearranged and marked by experience.

That idea also broadens the wardrobe. Dreaming Eli describes SS27 as its most complete collection to date, extending into jackets and lingerie-inspired pieces alongside established elements of the label’s design language.

Distressing Becomes a Form of Construction

The clearest expression of the concept comes through technique. Dreaming Eli develops its signature distressing through manipulated silk and layers of cotton and gauze, working with blush and rose tones alongside white and a more severe black. Hand painting continues from the previous season, while ruffles and pearls contribute to surfaces conceived in relation to collaged old photographs.

Screen printing is introduced for SS27, bringing decorative references drawn from baroque Sicilian churches and tattoo imagery onto the clothes. Elsewhere, a vinyl technique developed in the previous season is pushed into combinations of denim, lace and vinyl intended to create a leather-like appearance. Lace is hand-cut and ripped to expose the materials beneath, making the act of revealing one layer through another part of the garment itself.

This is where Dreamers in Exile becomes more than a literal story about leaving one place for another. Distressing, cutting and layering function as physical equivalents of the collection’s central idea: the past is neither erased nor kept untouched. It remains visible, but in a changed form.

Familiar Accessories, Reworked

The collection also revisits existing Dreaming Eli accessories. The Wild Hearts Bleed Platform Heels return with a satin finish and new blush and rose colourways alongside the core offering.

The New Pearl 3D bag range has also been updated and refined. The pieces are created and 3D printed in partnership with Harry Mack and engineered by experiential production studio Unit9, bringing digital fabrication into a collection otherwise strongly concerned with worn surfaces, ageing and traces of the past.

Founded by Elisa Trombatore in 2021 following her MA at CSM, Dreaming Eli has consistently positioned contradiction within femininity as part of its creative language. With Dreamers in Exile, that tension is redirected towards memory: between attachment and departure, imagined futures and lived experience, and the versions of ourselves that are left behind without ever entirely disappearing.