Finally, the blog post that needs no introduction at all. After all the teasing, the polls and the waiting we can officially talk about and see the 'Out of Africa' collection by Erstwilder.
To be completely honest I still thought this collection was quite a while away yet so this completely took me by surprise, but I'm delighted to be able to talk about it today.
This collection must be one of the biggest I have seen from Erstwilder, all together we have three necklaces, fifteen brooches and two sets of earrings. It's bloomin huge! Not that it is a bad thing but it does make it harder to pick your favourites.
For those of you who read the blog regularly you will know that I love a good necklace so that fact we have three in this collection delights me beyond anything else.
I feel like on this collection Erstwilder have been quite good at trying new little tweaks and experiments with the way the collection takes shape. I think it will be a good test to see how well things sell out to see how receptive people are about some of the new additions.
For example one of the necklaces is an amazing shimmering tree, while this is very cool what does top it off is that it is actually accompanied by a little monkey brooch, so you can double team your outfit with one single piece.
Along those lines, in the last collections we saw the very limited Babushka doll sell out within seconds. Erstwilder have once again tried to recreate that success by including another triple brooch set in this collection. This time we have three very cute little meerkats. I love the little guys but wasn't sure how I would wear all three, personally I would have loved the option to just have one for those days when I just wanted a smaller, understated brooch.
The rest of the collection comes pretty much as we would have expected, amazingly cute animals and full of bright colours. I think once we saw the first sneak peek we knew that we were not going to get anything dull or drab in this collection. I'm sure a few people would have liked to see the animals in their natural colours but looking back this isn't really what Erstwilder has ever been about. I for one love the use of brighter colours.
Now there is one piece that I feel I really do have to talk about. The tree brooch. While this might not be everyone's cup of tea I must stress how truly stunning this piece is. My photos do it no justice at all. Four layers thick and made up of the must beautiful resin. The way it it layers and is composed really is something else in this collection. If you get an opportunity to see one in real life I do feel like you will change your mind about this piece.
As expected I think this has been a complete favourite of mine collection wise, I will always push for something other than a full animal collection, but the animals that have been done have been done really well. I think we have something for everyone in this and it delivers exactly what I was hoping it would.
I will say that I wish Erstwilder had been a little bit braver when it came to this collection. I know alot of people's opinions had been ringing in their ears from the Japanese launch and the infamous 'cultural appropriation' term. This I feel led them to doing a solely animal based collection (with the exception of the tree brooch) but personally I love pushing boundaries and creating something unique and I would have liked to have seen more than just animals but I am aware that is quite a personal choice.
Having said that it became so difficult for me to pick my favourites from this collection, never mind a top three as usual but I will give it a go.
Giraffes are my favourite animal so the brooch is a complete no brainer for me, along with the necklace of the three animals walking along side each other.
Finally I think the little elephant with her baby just makes it into the top three, I am enjoying the recent shift to closed eyes on the animal portraits and I think it adds to the cuteness. My mind swayed so many times it really was difficult to choose my top three but what about you?
Don't forget if you love anything you see here you can shop the whole collection right here in the Uk from Lottie and Lu (HERE)
Which three pieces are your favourite? Did you end up buying from this collection? Let me know what you think over on our Facebook page, and thank you again for reading!
