Designer Heidi Merrick is launching her fall 2013 ready-to-wear collection with a video shot by Judson Morgan inside her downtown Los Angeles studio. As sunlight streams into Merrick’s workspace, a model dons each shirt, skirt and dress. She twirls, she poses, she buttons a blouse—she wears the clothes. And that’s the main conceit for the film: to show the drape of each piece and the exact moment when the air catches a silk skirt and the fabric takes flight. “The model came in and we shot it within 40 minutes of her arrival,” says Merrick. “It was the first time she had tried on the collection so she was discovering it as we filmed.” Merrick, who began her line in 2006 with four pieces that she draped, patterned and sewed herself, selected a muse of the shoot who had what she called a “real California look.”

Merrick says she found inspiration for the new collection in the Moroccan tiles in her Silverlake house and also in the horses at her brother’s Carpinteria property. “I’m always trying to pay homage to whatever part of my life is beautiful to me at the moment,” Merrick says. The designer, daughter of legendary surfboard shaper Al Merrick who strives to have her pieces manufactured within walking distance from her L.A. studio, was watching lots of Little House on the Prairie reruns that inspired the prairie skirt, and the tie-dyed hand-painted silk pants are a reference to a shirt her brother wore in high school. “The tie-dyed silk is laid out in a huge warehouse and it’s painted on with brushes. It’s spectacular. Every yard is different,” says Merrick.

To create the color palette, Merrick found herself inspired by an exhibition of Catherine Opie photographs called Twelve Miles to the Horizon. “Opie was commissioned by Hanjin Shipping, a cargo shipping company with a route from Busan, Korea to the Port of Long Beach. She shot a series of poster-size images of the sunrise and sunset. There were dark navy tones, blacks, golds, dark oranges, and even some red tones in the shots. Other images were gloomy. I had a booklet from the show on my desk when I was looking at fabrics.” Indeed, Merrick’s vegan leathers, silk carré and tweeds take on the vivid colors of the sun in her fall collection that ranges in price from $250 to $1,287. And the pieces still reflect Merrick’s trademark luxe but sporty aesthetic. “The shape of the clothes has that easy California feel and you can see it as the model tries everything on,” Merrick says. “That inspired the video.” And the pile of clothes left on the floor at the end of the film is a cheeky reminder that art imitates life.

By Elizabeth Varnell

Pictured: Heidi Merrick
Photo by Nell Campbell

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