Erdem (Q3043)
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| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Erdem |
company |
Statements
2009
designer
“It’s never about a portrait of someone—never painted from life—but rather fragments of a character.” Erdem Moralioglu began a conversation about his pre-fall collection with a description of the evocative, romantic paintings of Kaye Donachie, but he might’ve been talking about his own work. Purely coincidentally, Donachie graduated in fine art from London’s Royal College of Art a few years ahead of when Moralioglu graduated from the fashion program, but the imaginative ways that the two alums highlight the histories of women has strange symmetry. “We have a kind of similarity of approaches.”Anyone who follows—or wears—Erdem is familiar with the female character studies that background his collections. His host of splendid, talented, eccentric, radical, and sometimes tragic heroines stretches back to include Maria Callas; Debo, Duchess of Devonshire; Radclyffe Hall; Tina Modotti; Adele Astaire; the Victorian botanist Marianne North; and many more. In the same way, Donachie has invented her own poetic impressionist techniques, blurrily picturing the faces of literary women and muses in her delicate washes of blue-tinted brush-work.So you could call Moralioglu’s pre-fall collection the initial sketches for his fall runway show. A full collaboration with Donachie will be revealed at London Fashion Week in February. Their joint starting point has been the portrait Donachie made of Moralioglu’s late mother. “I commissioned Kaye, because she has this method of re-imagining people that she’s never met. She painted my mother as a young woman, before I could have known her.”The slightly blurry photography hints at the atmospheric artistry behind the inspiration: the “quick, gestural strokes” of florals and embroideries; the blues of printed denim evoking Donachie’s cyanotypes. The result, however, is as laser-sharply focused as everything Moralioglu ever makes. It is a collection that partially looks as if it might have been pulled out of a dressing-up box—perma-creases and all—yet is full of modern craftsmanship and a real sense of where these clothes will be going, and who will want to be wearing them next year.
3 December 2024
The idea of ‘masculine-feminine’ has been deployed ever since Yves Saint Laurent introduced tuxedos for women in 1966—but it’s taken till now for designers to start putting the L into LGBTQIA+ as far as visibility in fashion collections is concerned. In London, S.S. Daley started Fashion Week with his collection about the artist Gluck and Constance Spry, and Erdem’s spring offering was sketched around his research into the lives of the dandified novelist Radclyffe Hall and the sculptor Una, Lady Troubridge, who mostly wore pretty dresses“Radclyffe was most famous for writingThe Well of Loneliness, which has become a kind of queer, lesbian bible of sorts,” Erdem Moralioglu related after his collection of distinctly contrasting trouser suits and arrays of drop-waisted dress silhouettes had walked the steps and courtyard of the British Museum.The title page of theThe Well of Lonelinesswas printed on cavas and sewn as a badge of honor to the cuff of every suit—with a monocle pinned to each of the lapels. The novel was notoriously banned by the British government in 1928 for its portrayal of a female character called Stephen and her lover Mary. “Radclyffe was born Marguerite, and went by the name of John,” said Moralioglu. “What I was most interested in was how intensely she was masculine, and how feminine Una was.”He went to the Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton to get the fit of the collections’ suits correct—the results strode out in everything from pinstripes to a singularly excellent black dinner jacket. Still, Moralioglu wasn’t sticking literally to the vintage visuals. The extremely delicate dresses were gorgeous in period shades of eau-de-nil, peach and silver tissue lamé, and then many more abstract confections in deeper greens and shocking pink.Moralioglu’s repertoire extended to denim—in pale mint it treated some of his extraordinarily bedazzling sparkling crystal embroideries. Backstage, the designer was wearing a T-shirt printed with a green carnation—a secret symbol of homosexuality from Oscar Wilde’s time. He pointed out that it was being sold as part of his support for akt, the only UK charity providing support for homeless LGBTQIA+ 16-25 year olds, and Not A Phase, a trans-led grassroots charity. The persecution and suppression of queer people a hundred years ago might seem like far off history, but, Moralioglu reminded his audience, it still persists in pernicious ways today.
15 September 2024
“I’m often associated with dresses,” Erdem Moralioglu began, as he was leafing through his resort collection in his London office. “But interestingly, in my store in South Audley Street, it’s also tailoring that people are buying.”While marrying up both sides of his repertoire this season, he spent many hours at the London Library, his habitual haunt for research. There he hit on the work, life, and loves of Radclyffe Hall, the British lesbian author whose 1928 novelThe Well of Lonelinesscaused a scandal, was subjected to an obscenity trial, and banned. An at-home photograph of Hall, crop-haired in a smoking jacket and bow tie, with her lover, the sculptor and poet Una Troubridge, who is wearing a shimmery metallic 1920s cocktail dress, offered the coda for the collection.Knowing Moralioglu’s train of thought, this character-study is the precursor to developing his fall show, just as he sketched out his terrific runway odes to Deborah Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, and Maria Callas in his last two pre-seasons. The balance and contrast between masculine tailoring—coats, wide-leg trousers, waistcoats—and vaguely flapper-era draped silhouettes is nicely caught, each side as detailed and attractive as the other.Theme apart, Moralioglu’s work is grounded in his intelligent understanding of what women need for occasion dressing—a particular kind of practical modern romanticism that never errs on the too-much. There’s the elegant simplicity of draped dresses, strewn with 3-d flowers, with an asymmetric cape aflutter on one shoulder, a shape also echoed in a swathed-neck sweater. In the tailored pieces, again, there are flowers—as appliques on a swaggering Prince of Wales coat, or prints superimposed on nipped-waist skirt suits. One is a utilitarian country outdoor look, excellent for the kind of rainy weather the UK has been putting up with this spring—or perhaps, who knows, great for a dog-show? For Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge were also dog-lovers, with a shared enthusiasm for raising and showing dachshunds and other pedigree canines.Before long, one feels, we’re sure to be seeing much more of the history of early 20th century lesbian culture and style from Moralioglu. His mood-board was full of forgotten and illicit imagery of women-only clubs and erotica. “This is the sort of direction I’m going in,” he hinted, not giving away too much.
22 May 2024
We could begin by focusing in on the pea green opera coat with its extravagantly exaggerated collar at the start of the Erdem show, and then flick to the same silhouette at the finale, this time strewn with a rose print on white satin, but quilted, almost like the memory of a 1950s housecoat. In between—and in the soundscape—we had Erdem Moralioglu’s extended tribute to Maria Callas, her greatness, her status, and style “almost as a pop idol of the ’50s,” as he put it, and her unraveling as a tragic recluse, undone by the betrayal of the love of her life.His deep exploration of the life of Callas, on- and offstage, began with his precollection—research on her performances and dramatic costumes around the centenary of her birth in 2023. The complex psychologies of extraordinary women of the past have always been the fuel for Moralioglu’s layered design approach; the plots always blending into his own design narrative: a romantic, flowered, maybe raw-edged recasting of formal social-occasion dress codes.Callas’s wardrobe—the tiny-waisted, full-skirted dresses; draped scarf necklines; swing coats—the midcentury-modern textile art involved in opera productions, and the idea of glamorous marabou feathers gone a bit mad set Moralioglu off. “I was fascinated by the push and pull between person and persona,” he said. Carmine red dresses, roses attached to the toes of slingbacks, as if thrown at her feet onstage, and then satin pajamas and shoes evoking marabou slippers hinted at that story line.Then you could pan out from the clothes and take in the fact that the show was held beneath the Parthenon statues at the British Museum. The antiquities by the fifth- century sculptor and architect Phidias were renamed by the British as the Elgin Marbles from the time they were removed from Athens and shipped to the UK by the agents of the British 7th Earl of Elgin in the early 19th century. Their rightful cultural ownership has been an official matter of contention between Greece, the museum, and the British government since 1983. The long, drawn-out negotiations between the Greek and British governments for their return, or at least a loan, to the Acropolis museum made headlines last November in yet another diplomatic stand-off.Moralioglu was definitely thinking about Callas’s Greekness when he sought permission to show there: “Specifically, I really studied a specific performance she did in 1953 ofMedea.” That Euripides tragedy was the ancient link, but there was more.
Callas was born in New York, trained in Greece, and made her name on the world stage. “I wanted to show in this space that epitomized her Greekness,” he said, adding, “I was interested in the idea of someone starting off somewhere and ending up somewhere else.”Was he hinting about a resonance in his own life story as the Canadian-born son of an English mother and Turkish father who settled in London? Perhaps. He also made a final remark to the press that he had been moved by a photograph of Callas’s ashes, draped in the Greek flag, before they were interred in Greece. A Greek cultural icon, repatriated. He didn’t elaborate further, but the significance seemed to hang in the air.
17 February 2024
The centenary of the birth of Maria Callas—La Divina, the Tigress—is being celebrated this week. Her voice, her celebrity, the drama and tragedy of her career and love-life—and the fanatical world-wide publicity she enjoyed and then endured in the 1950s—make her a perfect subject for Erdem Moralioglu. His pre-fall begins his tribute to her fierce glamour and complex character, a contemporary operatic fashion duet, really.“She wasn’t a delicate soprano—she was a force with a raw, powerful extraordinary voice,” he observed at a preview, talking about the research he’d done on Callas at London’s Royal Opera House. Her soigné image is caught in black-and-white press photographs as she moved before and after performances through crowds as huge as any that Hollywood actors or, later, pop stars could draw. “She was dressed by Madame Biki, a Roman couturier who is almost forgotten, though she was the granddaughter of Puccini,” Moralioglu pointed out, admiring the nipped silhouettes of her dresses, the extravagant necklines, the elegance of post-war Italian alta moda.Getting into character—as it were—is a creative process that plays out in Moralioglu’s mind over his pre- and mainline collections. Last season, it was his triumphant two-part series on Debo Devonshire; before that, there were two episodes inspired by the stories of the fallen Victorian women who were housed at the same Bloomsbury address he now owns. His pre-fall 24 is a more of an empathetic psychological study of what it takes to be a performer of Callas’s magnitude. “Onstage-offstage. The kind of transformation that happens to someone stepping off stage. Looking at how someone can be as vulnerable and powerful as Callas was, at the same time.”It’s not costume. Moralioglu very well understands the feeling his customers have of going out in public today; when how you look will be captured and critiqued on phones and social media forever. His Callas-sourced clues probably don’t read until you get down to his pre-fall cocktail and evening dresses. The flourish of a carnation-pink bow-sash, wrapped around the torso of a slim black midi dress, which then turns into a sort of train. Or a strapless one, made entirely of 3-D roses, a little faded and romantically squashed—a memory, perhaps, of flowers thrown at Callas’s feet at the end of one of her great performances at La Scala in Milan.The point is that he sees day as well.
His roses are also strewn graphically across a black and white menswear check coat and sheath dress. Big, blue cabbage roses—so reminiscent of the 1950s—appear on full-skirted cotton summer frocks (as they were called back then). Pre-fall drops in June. That’s plenty in time for weddings, film festivals, and all of that. But knowing Moralioglu, this is only him tuning up for the full Callas aria experience at his show in February.
6 December 2023
Erdem Moralioglu’s spring collection was a tour de force, a very English romance and detailed love letter to the character and wardrobe of the late Deborah “Debo” Cavendish, the Mitford girl who married the Duke of Devonshire and famously took on the saving of possibly the grandest of all family estates, Chatsworth House. Debo’s practical country garb, her love of rare-breed chickens, her ’50s ball gowns, and her penchant for bug jewelry and Elvis Presley have inspired countless fashion designers, stylists, and photographers over the years. The difference is that Moralioglu had access.Some of Debo’s 1940s floral curtains even got whipped up into the skirts of his evening dresses—and, by the looks of it, into the gloriously chintzy fusion of Barbour waxed jacket and voluminous opera coat that opened his show at the British Museum. “I was lucky enough to work with the textile and jewelry archivists at Chatsworth, and with Helen Marchant, [Debo’s] former private secretary,” he said. His research within Debo’s wardobe, formal portraits, family snaps, and the house itself blended into a collection where richly tattered fabrics—as if gently decayed over centuries—were mixed up with all manner of full-skirted, vivid-print frocks; jeweled lingerie dresses; kilt suits; unraveling tweeds; and Elvis-tribute, rock-and-roll, crystal-studded leather jackets.It was peak Erdem, of course. The biographies of strong and unconventional women have always informed the background of the designer’s best work—and this subject, as aristocratic a chatelaine and hostess as they come, was also a robustly practical countrywoman and, as he put it, “a strict proponent of make do and mend.” Debo’s brisk organizing abilities helped save the house after steep death duties brought about the sale to the nation of the 15th-century Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (now hanging in the V&A). A blown-up image of the medieval scenery was there today in a blue and white printed dirndl. Her quirky penchant for collecting bug jewelry—which she passed on to her granddaughter Stella Tennant—was caught in dragonfly brooches and a two-pronged tiara that looked just like a pair of insect antennae.Was there a bit of Mitfordian wit when it came to the shoes too? Something about the floppy fabric bows on the toes started to raise the possibility that Moralioglu might actually have been referencing the feathered feet of rare-chicken breeds—another of Debo’s great hobbies.
There was serious chic involved as well, though, and an important sense of things being passed down, altered, and reused by each generation. At the end, when the antique flowery cotton drapes got mixed up in tulle ball skirts, there was yet another family contribution to the mix—some black lace embroidery hand-done by Stella Tennant’s daughter, Cecily Lasnet, Debo’s great-granddaughter.
17 September 2023
Erdem Moralioglu falls sincerely in love with a new woman, or women, from some historical moment all the time. This much we know about the allusive way his creative mind organizes itself. The 1950s romance that has taken over his pre-spring collection is with Deborah (or ‘Debo’), the late Duchess of Devonshire and former chatelain of Chatsworth. By way of introduction, her girlhood nickname, which stuck to her for life, is emblazoned in pearls on a navy cashmere crewneck sweater.It starts off with a great big alpaca animal-printed exaggeration of an A-line swing coat, and continues through a series of quite lavishly draped, printed, and jewel-encrusted evening things. One of his off-the-shoulder black velvet dresses with bows on either side of the neckline is a direct reference to a Deborah portrait by Cecil Beaton. In other words, Moralioglu is in his element, beckoning his customers towards the holiday season with a richly-referenced homage to the grandly quirky style of the Duchess.Her penchant for collecting insect-brooches runs all over the beetle, spider, and dragon-fly jewelry pinned on ballgowns and nonchalantly draped exaggerations of ladylike cashmere twinsets. Then there are his representations of the outdoor life of the lady of the estate, who famously bred rare-breed chickens and was as good friends with local farmers as she was with the likes of Lucian Freud, who painted her portrait. Cue very Erdem-ite retakes on his signature trench coats, beige in the front, fan-pleated tweed in the back, and a sensible Prince of Wales checked walking suit with a kilted skirt.To be fair, Moralioglu is far from the first fashion designer, writer, biographer, or artist to be mesmerized by Debo. There’s a whole literary Mitfordania industry built on the story around the six wildly different Mitford sisters. Debo, being the youngest, declared as a child that she’d grow up and marry a Duke, and did.But, through a chain of relationships and circumstances (one being his friendship with Laura Burlington, who was an early boutique buyer of Erdem at the Bluebird store in the mid-2000s and is the daughter-in-law of the present Duke and Duchess of Devonshire) he has been given permission by the family to study her wardrobe in the house archive.The set of these photographs, shot by Campbell Addy, hints at the black and white marble Chatsworth floors and behind-the-scenes dust sheets.
Knowing Moralioglu’s tendency for deep-dive historical research in museums, libraries, and private collections, it’s a fair suspicion that his pre-spring collection must be only the start of his findings. Come his September show, there’ll surely be much more on Debo to come.
21 June 2023
Erdem Moralioglu lives in a house that was once “a home of hope” for “fallen and friendless young women.” When he and his architect husband started to peel back the layers of their Bloomsbury house, they found what seemed to be a “ghost” of a door, arsenic wallpaper, and a hatch that may have been used to surveil the inmates. More than 3,000 young women had lived there between 1860 and the early 20th century. “They were women with no means. Widows, sacked women, maybe seamstresses,” Erdem said.Of course, it led him to research everything around the contemporary culture of the Victorian London that these poor, desperate girls and women lived in. He found a record of a couple of intoxicated girls causing a fracas outside their home after curfew. Every season he compiles a book of his source materials. This time, it included Victorian fashion plates of crinolined ladies, an erotic photo of one of the “fallen,” with her skirts hitched up to dislay her naked legs, and a copy of The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s 1892 early feminist psychological horror novella about a woman suffering “hysteria” after the birth of a baby, domestically imprisoned by her family, eventually hallucinating that she’s trapped behind the wallpaper of her bedroom.And so he was off, designing his collection, a push-and-pull between gothic Victoriana and rebellious wantonness. “I’ve been preoccupied by the blackness, the strictness. The Victorians were so buttoned-up, but I wanted to work with the contrast between that, and an undoneness—a surreal, cloudy, arsenic-induced dream.” The narrative was a gift for his genre of evening wear—never a costume show, but a beckoning into the romantic-modern culture of textiles, embroidery, and prints his customers love to be involved with.In the smoky London-smog grayness of a studio space of the Sadlers Wells theater, we saw it begin to emerge in his jet-embroidered coats and disarrayed asymmetric taffeta skirts. There were exaggerated puff-topped opera gloves with almost everything. Art nouveau irises climbed up through needle-punched patterns. Injections of arsenic yellow and lilac—he toxic fashion colors invented in the 19th century industrial revolution—showed up vividly.Erdem is never so carried away by theme that he neglects to speak to the broader church of those who come to him. Some prefer tailoring. They can find that in his offerings of a black tuxedo, and a chrysanthemum-brocade trouser suit.
And perhaps best of all: one double-breasted yellow-wallpaper coat, proper and posh, except for the fact that it was unraveling at the hem.
19 February 2023
One of these days, Erdem Moralioglu really ought to costume a historical movie. This season is a sort of pre-fall trailer for the season to come; a staging-post between his exquisite, veiled, museum conservation-inspired show for spring, and the ideas he’s rehearsing for his upcoming fall runway. “It’s about bringing this Victorian world to life.”It’s not that Erdem’s collections are ever front-on costumey. They’re made for the social whirl of modern events, balanced out with his more practical daywear takes on tailoring, trousers, and suchlike. Nadine Ijewere was photographing his notes on a theme—puffed-sleeved dresses, varieties of long-skirted silhouettes, cropped bustiers, elaborate-but-light textures and embroideries, and more sober coats—while he talked through the backstory that lies behind them.This chapter’s colors, prints, silhouettes, and suggestions of under-things are shadow-projections of his research in the London Library in St James’s Square. “I’m there every Tuesday. I mean, you can read books that Virginia Woolf used to borrow!” Erdem’s recent studies have immersed him in the wallpapers and upholsteries of Victorian houses, and the crinolined fashions worn by the women who lived in them. “I’ve been looking at this time, around the 1860s, when the Industrial Revolution was happening. When there were new dyes—this arsenic green became possible and cyanotype photography.”A flounced, dark green ball skirt, a Watteau-back dress, broderie anglaise petticoat dresses, and 3-D anemone appliqués came out of his hours of study, while narrow, pleated, flower-sprigged dresses harked more towards children’s book illustrations by Kate Greenaway.Every season, his narratives sound more like the pages of an evolving script. Are there definite characters beginning to emerge from these pre-fall sketches? There usually are, by the time Erdem gets to mount his runway shows. We’ll see when his next act takes the stage in London Fashion Week in February.
5 December 2022
The last moments of Erdem’s show—three models walking, their faces and full-skirted ball gowns fully veiled in black tulle—felt like a page being inscribed in the annals of British fashion history. This was a show on the eve of the state funeral of a monarch who had reigned for 70 years. Of course it was a tribute, done respectfully, and far from gratuitously. For Erdem Moralioglu is a designer whose whole aesthetic and inspiration comes from his passion for history, and his singling out of the stories of women he greatly admires.So this finale, slowly walked through the grand colonnades of the British Museum, did indeed feel like a dignified, loving farewell to Queen Elizabeth, from a fashion designer who has researched and referenced her long before now. Yet it was, and it wasn’t. Looking at history and being a museum, gallery, and library geek is totally Erdem’s modus operandi. His first show was in the V&A. He’s had a long relationship with the National Portrait Gallery. He spends days in the London Library. And actually, this collection—as he explained afterwards—had to do with his fascination for the behind-scenes work of museum conservators.“It’s so funny, because I started the collection research here at the British Museum actually, and taking the design team to look at how they were restoring 17th century etchings; or how they might deal with restoring a tapestry or a Dutch Master.” At the V&A, he was inspired by seeing the crinolined structures the conservators built to slowly, painstakingly put the decaying fragments of an 18th century gown back together—and by the dust-sheets they use. And by happenstance, those dust-sheets were already translating themselves into the veils he wanted to show.“It was this idea of, if you study an object or dress so closely, over such a long time, do you start to become that thing?” A romantic, vaguely crazed projection of ideas onto imagined characters: this is Erdem all over. It produced all the kinds of sweeping shapes, prints, and embellishments his customers love: a grand sweeping trench-ballgown with a train, the appearance of fraying hems, a touch of antique-contemporary undone-ness. There is a lot to think about in Britain about the passing of an era. Being there, at Erdem’s show, on such an evening felt like being part of it. But then again, as his work—and the existence of all the British museums proves—the momentous significance of the past is never gone.
19 September 2022
Beautiful young men standing in an English country garden, against beds of succulent purple and yellow flag irises. Erdem Moralioglu, with his cinematic eye for glancingly historical biographical references, almost conjured a reincarnation of an everyday scene from the country life of the painter and plantsman Cedric Morris for his summer menswear collection. It was shot at Benton End in rural Suffolk, Morris’s home from 1939, where he created a microcosm of an artistic avant-garde bohemian life with his lover Arthur Lett-Haines, as well as founding an art school. Lucian Freud was an early pupil.As promised, Moralioglu revealed the thread of this story which connects with his resort womenswear collection. Cedric Morris, it turns out, was a friend and supplier of the society florist Constance Spry, who designed the Queen’s Coronation and who had her highly successful shop a few doors down from where the Erdem flagship is now. Connie Spry and her aristo clientele are all over his collection. There’s nothing like a romantic coincidence to get Moralioglu going. This one was a pure gift in terms of the colors he loves, inspiration for his boyishly foppish sense of style all the way through to the floppy, blowsy bow ties which seem almost like blooming corsages picked from Morris’s iris beds.The idea for digging into this aristocratic alternative history had actually hit him a little while ago at a Cedric Morris exhibition at the Garden Museum. Even without knowing a thing about this artist, though, you can sense the spirit of the 1940s that Erdem picked up in photos and paintings: Englishmen in hand-knitted sweaters, tweeds, shorts, and silk dressing gowns. Most notably, given current menswear fashion trends, there are flowing Oxford bags in various fabrics, one of them in white needlecord with a matching blazer. Moralioglu has embroidered his own monogram on the pocket, E, with his birthdate, 1977, beneath it. It appears on the breast of a marine sweater too. A posh touch; a branch into branding; everything in Erdem’s menswear garden is springing up nicely.
17 June 2022
In 1952, Constance Spry was commanded to prepare the flowers for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In a flourish of historical serendipity for Erdem Moralioglu, England’s most influential society florist had her shop at 64 South Audley Street, six doors down from his store at number 70. It was inspiration on a plate—and right on cue for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee.Erdem is as loved for his own florals as he is for cultivating his narratives around the lives of surprising, overlooked women of the past. Constance Spry is one of those, in buckets. In the 1950s, she had British housewives going mad for her lessons in abstract home flower arranging (a very English combination of kitchen garden improvisation and Ikebana). She was also a society caterer. For the coronation, faced with feeding hundreds of dignitaries after the service, she invented Coronation Chicken (a cold dish involving mayonnaise, curry powder, almonds, and dried apricots). The recipe went on to become a British national dish, but the name of Constance Spry has been more or less forgotten.Erdem was boggling at all these timely Jubilee resonances while showing his collection for resort. “Constance Spry was kind of amazing,” he said, “designing Elizabeth’s coronation from her shop Flower Decoration, just the other side of this block!” He was studying a pin-board stuck with images of Connie and her school for girls; black and white photos of her flower arrangements; and other photos of ’50s English couture. “All of these badly-printed black and white photos of her arrangements were taken in her studio, in the shop. She loved Dutch flower still lifes,” he continued, pointing out the shadowy prints and embroideries he derived from them. “Constance was very practical, she was a gardener, but also a fantasist. So there’s this push-and-pull between something very utilitarian and playing with this couture-y kind of ridiculousness. It’s almost like her imaginary wardrobe for the kind of patrons that she worked for.”Constance herself was a substantial woman in a tweed suit who appears to have been an unlikely social butterfly. “She was frumpy, but she had this incredible imagination.” By the 1930s she was in wildly fashionable demand. Connie it was who designed Wallis Simpson’s wedding celebrations to Edward VIII at their house in France.
She was also gay, having a long relationship with the younger artist Gluck, who cut an elegant figure about London in impeccable men’s tailoring and became famed for her stylized deco flower paintings of Constance’s works.
7 June 2022
There was a point in the Erdem show where a series of muted fleurs de nuit jacquard dresses seemed to disintegrate before your eyes, the threads of their hems unraveling into fringes that wrapped around the models’ ankles like spiderwebs. It was the most exquisite moment of the designer’s darkest and most unnerving collection to date, and one of his most ravishing ever.The collection imagined the nightlives of a group of extraordinary women who embodied Berlin’s progressive cultural spirit in the 1930s: the painters Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler; the dancers Anita Berber and Valeska Gert; and photographer Madame d’Ora, whose work and being already played muse to the men’s collection Moralioglu launched last month and filtered onto his runway today.Nearly a century before terms like “non-binary” and “fluid” would be added to our gender-oriented vocabularies, artists like these were cross-dressing and opening Germany’s first lesbian bars amid the looming gloom of war and extreme conservatism. Moralioglu is an expert at mirroring contemporary waves in the motifs of the past: he didn’t need to say it, the parallels were clear.“It was interesting, that time and period. I liked the idea that it was club, and maybe they were on their way out, like ghosts. It’s the end of the night and they’re trailing away…” he said backstage at Sadler’s Wells, where a smoke-filled black box lit up by dusty pillars of light, featuring a dramatic solo pianist, created an opulent and melancholy cabaret-like mood. Like his choice of venue, Moralioglu’s collection expressed itself through the language of reduction.Every look was characterized by its own distinctive sense of degenerated glamour: unraveling like those jacquard dresses, tattered like the hammered ivory silk dress pulled down to the floor by lavish black beading, dominated like a grey skirt-suit invaded by gunmetal studs, fragile like the transparent black dress hand-sewn from tulle strips and embroidered with tiny pearls or deconstructed like the lace dresses slashed open by the sharpness of shiny, black sequined panels.Often, these elements read like a different language for Moralioglu: yes, founded in history as his practice prescribes, but thought- and fear-provoking in a way that felt entirely relevant through a current socio-political lens. It was an astute and totally mesmerizing theater for the senses, and for the mind.
21 February 2022
Between the baseball cap, hoodie, and bomber jacket that found their way into Erdem Moralioglu’s second menswear collection, you’d be tempted to call it streetwear. “Utilitarian romanticism,” the designer replied resolutely on a video call. He has a point: In a world where people wear couture-house joggers to dinner, and even Moralioglu—who I suspect still has his newspaper ironed in the morning—surrenders to sporty dress codes, streetwear is really just daywear. “It’s a boiled fleece hoodie with a tailored, nipped jogger,” he said of the collection’s most informal look, describing those garments exactly like he would his ladylike womenswear.But unlike that womenswear—a longstanding and big business—Moralioglu’s men’s world has a relaxed, almost light-hearted quality about it. With the line still in its infancy, these clothes are borne out of a curiosity and interest, and feel like a project he’s having fun with. The designer has been living in the spring men’s collection since he received the first pieces, and, as he confirmed, “it’s very personal.” While the first collection only started to arrive in stores in November, his recipe of ravishingly-colored knits, corduroy, and printed denim has seen great response from the yet-to-be-defined Erdem men’s customer, and has gone down well with his trusty female clientele, too.This season, he took inspiration from the work of two women, who may as well have played muses to one of his women’s collections: Madame d’Ora, a Viennese portrait photographer and contemporary of Picasso, and Madame Yevonde, a portrait and still-life photographer—and master colorist—who worked in London around the interwar era. Together, their subjects, grading techniques, and the latter’s use of color inspired a 1930s-driven collection, which borrowed from the women’s wardrobe of the time, and fused those references in Moralioglu’s contemporary “utilitarian romanticism.”A boucle tweed suit, also interpreted as a coat, exemplified that fusion, generating a kind of ladies-who-lunch look for men, which reflected a play on gender codes that interests Moralioglu. As he quipped, referring to the Erdem man, “He likes to eat lunch, too.” Other such ideas included a fisherman’s jumper twin set in merino mohair waffle knit, a cotton drill suit in rust embroidered head-to-toe with brown and blue roses, and a dandy-esque nipped-in 1930s suit with a wide, high lapel, which was almost jaunty. “Life’s short,” the designer said. “Pull yourself together.
”What emerged through Moralioglu’s second menswear proposal was a men’s universe of conventional contradictions: feminine vs. masculine, formal vs. informal, Old World vs. new world. Those dichotomies are hardly new territory in menswear, but through the lens of Erdem—with all its history and romanticism—this menswear brand already feels unique and familiar in a way that gives it a character of its own on a very saturated market. His “utilitarian romanticism” is here to stay.
10 January 2022
This summer, before his investiture by the Princess Royal, Erdem Moralioglu MBE took my fellow fashion critic Sarah Mower MBE to an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery. While I regretfully missed it, I feel as if I’ve seen it. Both my decorated industry colleagues told me about it in great detail and raved about its multifaceted subject: Eileen Agar, Surrealist movement maven and 1940s cool girl, who mixed with the likes of Lee Miller and Picasso, and was pictured dancing on interwar-era rooftops in see-through dresses. So inspired was Moralioglu by the experience that he decided to make Agar his muse for pre-fall.“I’m fascinated by her ability to take the mundane—the un-extraordinary—and make itextraordinary: taking a collage of very English geraniums and cutting it up and creating a large surreal hand out of it, or creating the strange hat that the V&A has, which is made out of gloves,” said the designer—pristinely clad in a delicate dusty blue roll-neck from his first-ever men’s collection—during an appointment in London. “She always wore these very controlled, nipped-in silhouettes, but her universe was very chaotic. I’m fascinated by those whose universe is chaotic when they themselves are extraordinarily controlled.”Moralioglu translated what he called the “nipped-in propriety” of Agar’s wardrobe into largely 1940s-influenced shapes and filled them in with the clashing, graphic sense of her work. “Polka dots mixed with zebra stripes and something that felt very upside down and beautiful. That was where I began,” he said. He colored those nipped-in silhouettes with printed patchworks, geranium motifs, and a wealth of sequins and crystals and pearls, and put rigid, regal ruffs on unexpected dresses. It wasn’t as wild as it sounds—after all, this was a pre-collection—but within the ladylike romanticism that underpins his work, Moralioglu made some pretty grand statements. “I love the idea of doing something that’s almost couture for pre-fall. There’s a realness to a pre-collection that makes it wonderful to have that be part of a dream as well,” he said, referring to the almost anti-daywear nature of the collection. He countered those elements with purpose-to-your-step flats and shot it in the gritty streets of Soho, Agar’s old stomping grounds. Dresses and coats covered in habutai rosettes mounted on silk georgette embodied the contrast Moralioglu wanted to convey: a kind of industrialized super refinement. (They will go into production.
) “They almost look like fur coats,” he noted.British art history is home turf for Moralioglu, who knows exactly how to create the ideal recipe for a pre-collection like this one. But after his investiture and his 15th anniversary in September—which sadly wasn’t afforded the attention it deserved at last week’s Fashion Awards in his hometown of London—there’s also a heightened confidence to his work, which shone through in the garments. In times like these, there’s a comfort to be found in the beauty of Erdem’s resilient safe haven: something controlled amid the chaos.
6 December 2021
It’s highly likely that Erdem Moralioglu’s new house in Bloomsbury is haunted. If he sees the ghosts of the area’s fabled 20th century women wandering his hallways at night, you know he’s chatting them up into the early hours, hoping for a first-rate possession to tickle his historicist senses. Ever since he moved into that house during the pandemic, Moralioglu’s work has taken on a more demure and sober character, which is, in fact, a bit ghostly. Somehow, the fusion between that sensibility and the old-world glamour that underpins his oeuvre feels appropriate for now. We’re ready to make wardrobe statements, but they can be whispers rather than cries.Moralioglu’s 15th-anniversary collection—and first runway show since the pandemic—captured that dichotomy in a purified and clarified ode to his own body of work. Presented in the colonnade of the British Museum (in Bloomsbury), he envisioned it through the wardrobes of Bloomsbury’s best: Edith Sitwell and Ottoline Morrell, whose spirits he could easily have come across on one of his evening strolls across Bedford Square. “I was really fascinated with these two women—both six foot—who knew each other, and donated to the British Museum,” Moralioglu said backstage, highlighting their independent and formidable approaches to life in the early- and mid-20th century.“Both women lived outside of the time that they actually lived in: Ottoline Morrell dressed in kind of Edwardian dress in the 1930s, and Edith Sitwell would wear something kind of medieval. They were displaced and disjointed in terms of time and pace,” he observed, with words that could have described the last 15 years of Erdem collections just as well. Throughout his own history, he has freely and defiantly traveled the annals of fashion history at large, spinning fantastical narratives around characters and events drawing on fact and fiction, and brought those looks into contemporary contexts.This collection was no different. While its silhouettes were carved from the first half of the previous century, Moralioglu twisted them out of their prim lines and switched opulent fabrics for “poor” ones, using instead embellishment as his richness factor. A delicate floral embroidery curled around dresses looked almost like an industrial chain print, quilted floral skirts were kind of wrong but cool, and lace dresses transformed into knitwear de-prettified that girly trope.
Styled consistently with unfussy brogues—and showed alongside the terrific sturdy-romantic menswear he launched this summer—those tactics created a sense and sensibility that spoke to that post-pandemic appetite for the gentle grand gesture.Before the show started, Moralioglu played a recording of Sitwell reciting the poem “Astronomers and Gardeners” from 1953. “I thought there was something poetic about building something of the earth, but looking upwards,” he said, no doubt thinking of his own company. Mid-show, between the columns of the museum’s colonnade, a huge rainbow formed in the Bloomsbury sky: a fitting tribute to the 15th anniversary of fashion’s most realistic dreamer.
19 September 2021
Erdem Moralioglu likes a man in a boatneck. He appreciates a slightly shortened blazer sleeve. And he loves the idea of the male twinset. We know this now because the designer—after 15 years in womenswear— is making his first proposal for a men’s wardrobe. “I think it was important to think of him as her brother,” Moralioglu said on a video call from London, continuing his tradition of speaking about his wearers as characters in the romantic narratives that frame his work. “He’s the brother or the friend that wears her clothes in his own way.”Moralioglu and his twin sister were raised in the suburbs of Canada by a British mother, who would immerse herself and her children in English literature and film as a form of cultivated homesickness. She instilled in him a British gentlemanliness and a feminine sensibility, which materialized exquisitely in his first men’s collection. This wasn’t the “boyfriend counterpart” to his female customer—the way many designers will describe their menswear—but her companion: a like-minded male energy, a confidante, a masculine manifestation of herself.Captured with certain melancholia on West Wittering Beach near Dungeness, the first Erdem men’s look to see the light of day was a beige trench coat crafted in tonal floral jacquard. Adapted from his recent women’s resort collection, the fabric looked like sturdy cotton twill but had all the sensitivity of the designer’s botanical dreams. It would be altmodisch to call it a balance between the masculine and the feminine. Rather, Moralioglu is about imbuing everything he makes with a certain soul; a memory that feels older and wiser than the garment itself.He evoked classic sartorial dress codes in silhouettes cinched with cummerbunds, elevating the casual character of square and straight chinos, the fit of which he had spent ages getting just right. Slightly shrunken tailored jackets had a 1920s boyishness to them à laBrideshead Revisited, the 1981 screen version of which wasn’t on Moralioglu’s mood board but certainly part of his mother’s TV viewing when he was a teenager. “I always like the idea of a historical costume distorted through a 1970s lens,” he said, listingThe Great Gatsby, The Damned, Barry Lyndon, andCabaret. There were traces of them all in these clothes.
16 June 2021
“Rational, I think, is the right word,” Erdem Moralioglu said during an appointment in his Mayfair store, holding up a dress from his resort collection. “A rational approach to a hand-embroidered red organza broderie anglaise gown with 3D flowers on it, punctuated by a black grosgrain belt,” he quipped. In recent seasons, the designer has been tempering his delicate, beflowered lines with a certain purity. If it’s rationalism over fantasy, the irony isn’t lost on him. At its heart, his brand—which celebrates its 15th anniversary this year—is rooted in romanticism: wistful narratives about the heroines of history, stately home grandeur, and Edwardian afternoons in the greenhouse. So, when Moralioglu strips down, his crinoline stays on.His resort proposal was an uncharacteristically narrative-free exercise for the storyteller. He devoted it to 15 years of collections, picking out some of the pieces “that still speak to me” and running them through his new purifying filter. Captured around London, it was an ode to the significant places where Moralioglu has shown and shot his collections, from Bedford Square and Manchester Square to the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Academy of Arts. “It felt like a love letter to the archetypes of Englishness,” he said, musing about Anglo tropes like the perfect trench coat, a particular nipped-in waist, dresses that look like your grandmother’s curtains, and Nancy Mitford casually throwing on a cardigan over a ballgown.Styled with no makeup and with flat brogues, his garments had a purpose to their step that you might associate with a decidedly English femininity. Within the whimsical territory Erdem occupies, they exuded a no-fuss attitude that could even pass for pragmatic—a word the designer welcomes more than a decade into his career, but would probably have scoffed at in his primmer, more proper beginnings. It’s what Moralioglu believes is called for in a post-pandemic fashion climate where preciousness and permanence go hand in hand. Now, he is captivated by wardrobe staples: garments that will stay in a woman’s wardrobe forever, like the shirting line he debuted last season and evolved into a line of shirt dresses for this collection, studied and refined with timeless precision.
They were layered with tailoring spun from the same philosophy but imbued with a little more character, such as a 1940s-cut cashmere-blend flannel jacket with lightly padded hips and a determined shoulder, or a sculpted tweed suit inter-knitted with yarns that evoked the dots of pheasant plume. Floral-embroidered denim easily captured the balance between dreamy and rational; as did bejeweled, light georgette day dresses and ones made in washed linen or hammered satin, walking Moralioglu’s new tightrope between the frail and the sturdy. The bustier shape of a rose tulle dress with matching floral appliqué was structured from pin-tucks that resembled boning, illustrating how a no-fuss Erdem approach translates into eveningwear. He said it should be worn with flats.“I found myself thinking about where we are, where we’re going, and how we’ve created these collections in London,” he reflected, with his store as his backdrop. More than anything, that space serves as a reminder of the head-to-toe brand Moralioglu has built, which now caters to a complete wardrobe for his loyal customer, from day to evening and every dress code in between. “There’s nothing wrong with referencing yourself. It’s a good thing to look at the body of work you’ve created over the last 15 years,” he said, driving home the message of permanence and longevity that underpins the world of Erdem, for realists and dreamers alike.
7 June 2021
If all the world’s a stage and we’re all mere players, where does that leave us now? Waiting in the wings, you might say, bracing ourselves for the moment that curtain finally goes up again. Erdem Moralioglu isn’t one for banal lockdown analogies (leave that to the critic) but he is at heart a dramatist, forever living for those exasperating theatrical seconds of silence between lights-out and showtime. In Great Britain, the strict confinement period is proving paradoxically motivating for the transformative narrative fashion that drives Moralioglu’s work. Conceived in the realm of ballet, his fall collection freeze-framed a dancer’s wardrobe between the stages of rehearsal and performance.“When I was working at the Royal Opera House, that was the moment I found so exciting: the dancers shifting around, criss-crossing, half-dressed in what they wear during the day and half-dressed in their costumes,” he said on a video call, recallingCorybantic Games, the ballet he created costumes for in 2018. Incidentally, the contrast between a ballerina’s everyday dancewear and her ornate costumes served as a rather poetic illustration of our impending transition from domestic dressing to dressing up. As far as the latter goes, Moralioglu is well-versed. The exquisiteness of feather-embroidered 1940s jackets,Swan Lakeheadpieces and plumed skirts, giant opera gowns daubed in night-time florals, and jewel-encrusted shirts inspired by the costumes favored by Frederick Ashton came as no surprise.Moralioglu’s investigation of the dressed-down—the drab—played a far more compelling part, simply because it’s so far from Erdem territory that it could never be drab. He expressed it in gray ribbed knitwear fashioned into quietly dramatic skirts that moved like knife pleats, into softly cinching cummerbunds, and body-conscious tops that had the elegance of eveningwear but the tactility of the comfort-wear of lockdown. With similar duality, he elevated ballet slippers onto stilted platforms that gave his silhouette an air of fetish. Perhaps that feeling was spurred by the narrative that underpinned his story: the relationship between Rudolf Nureyev and prima ballerina Margot Fonteyn, whose on- and off-stage wardrobe also informed proceedings.“When they met, he was 22 and she was 43. She was very much at the end of her career. There was something about the arc of a dancer’s career that I found quite inspiring,” Moralioglu said.
In a film choreographed by Edward Watson of the Royal Ballet, he portrayed through a cast including four accomplished ballerinas—Christina Arestis, Elizabeth McGorian, Marguerite Porter, and Zenaida Yanowsky—a simultaneous defiance and embrace of age. “With a dancer, one is what one does. Regardless if you’re 60 or 70, you remain a dancer for the rest of your life. There was something about that obsession that got me thinking aboutThe Red Shoes; someone so driven by one thing,” he reflected, referring to 1948 ballet film based on Hans Christian Andersen’s chilling tale of a pair of shoes that won’t stop dancing.“The contrasts, the dichotomies of a dancer…that Hitchcockian self-possession and drive for perfection,” Moralioglu paused. “I find the psychology of it interesting.” Perfecting a look—a sculpted sleeve, a nipped-in waist, a little plumed hat, a pair of neat red slippers—seems practically avant-garde at this stage in our interrupted lives. It was nice to be reminded of that feeling.
23 February 2021
“There’s something wonderfully modern about wearing a cashmere sweater to a black-tie event,” reflected Erdem Moralioglu on a screen-share from his office. Surrounded by women from another era—his newest portrait acquisitions lined up behind him—he was also demonstrating some rather cultivated digital skills. You could say that contrast summed up his collection: whimsy versus progress, the eternal duality ensconced in the mind of Moralioglu. If rioting against formal dress codes sounds like the irreverence of the new generations, he had of course found that inspiration in a much earlier front-runner. After spending lockdown readingLove in a Cold Climate,he devoted his collection to the “formal casualness” of Nancy Mitford’s own wardrobe. “Nipped but with a pleated skirt and boots,” as he said, producing a picture of the author in her country attire.At first glance, it looked like a typical Erdem proposal: romantic fil coupe floral dresses, neat tonal floral jacquard skirtsuits, and delicately hand-embroidered evening numbers fashioned in things like hammered silk. He juxtaposed his lady-core with cameos from the humble men’s wardrobe, such as big mohair cardigans, rugged trench coats, and stomp-y gardening boots, all derived from Mitford. The collection was shot around Gunnersbury House and its damp grounds; Moralioglu even topped off the pieces with sou’westers imagined in moiré, which would hardly have passed the Balmoral Test for outdoor apparel. But underpinning this aristocratic affair were this designer’s entirely contemporary values. The pragmatic nature of a precollection, he said, made him think about “lots of different women, lots of different body types, and lots of different moments during the day.”By inviting model Charlotte Robinson, a U.K. size 16, to pose for the look book, he continued the inclusive sizing efforts he launched with his last resort collection; he now offers a majority of his collections in sizes up to a U.K. 22. “It works as much as a size 6 works,” he said when asked about sales. “There’s a great power in being able to dress lots of different women. I would hate for someone to feel like they can’t be part of this world. When something is beautifully designed and considered, it should be able to work in different sizes. So why would you limit the sizes you offer?” He also cast Ikram Abdi Omar, a Bristol-raised Swedish model of Somali descent who wears a hijab.His choices were possessed by the spirit of Mitford.
“She marched to her own drum in a time when you had to dress in a certain way,” said Moralioglu. He had used his new print collaboration with Liberty as a form of research—“The way I would the National Portrait Gallery or the V&A”—losing himself in the years of their archives that corresponded with Mitford’s heyday. His muse would no doubt have approved of five white shirts borrowed from a men’s wardrobe, which will become part of Erdem’s permanent collection: the Romantic, the Robe, the Poet, the Tux, and the Victorian. “She was given a life she could have just lived and existed as an aristocrat. But she didn’t,” he said. “She wrote, she created a body of work. And she wrote her own rules…and broke them.”
17 December 2020
It reads like a mad experiment: Lock up Erdem Moralioglu in his London house for four months, deny him access to the museums and libraries that oxygenate his storyteller mind, and throw in a Susan Sontag novel, then lean back and enjoy the show. “It begins with three people dancing on the lip of a volcano,” the designer said of the collection he authored and drew in quarantine. Inspired byThe Volcano Lover, Sontag’s portrait of the 18th-century beauty Emma Hamilton, who married a volcanologist obsessed with Grecian vases and had a passionate love affair with Lord Nelson, this was how Moralioglu coped with everything that happened in the spring of 2020.A copy of the book served as the show notes, wrapped neatly in ivory tissue and placed on a ficus green velvet sofa in his South Audley Street store. The audience-less runway imagery was shot by a Grecian folly in Epping Forest and screened on an iPad handheld by Moralioglu himself. He had lost himself in the story of Hamilton, who lived in Naples at the cusp of the French Revolution and the seismic impacts it precipitated throughout Europe. There, she befriended the Neapolitan queen, the sister of Marie Antoinette; practiced Grecian tableaux vivants known as “attitudes”; and played out her illustrious love triangle as Vesuvius began to erupt. You couldn’t make it up, and he didn’t.“There was something about this odd time that we’re living in, and the idea that there is something so much bigger than all of us that controls everything,” Moralioglu said, drawing a parallel between crises past and present. “It’s beauty in a time that’s very ugly, and the idea of creating something decadent with an underbelly of something poor.” He expressed that sentiment in a meeting between formal and informal: a trans-historical voyage that referenced Grecian nymph shift dresses through the lens of the puff-sleeved empire silhouette, a sprinkling of Nelsonian regalia, and a cameo by Susan Sontag’s post-modern cardigan.Many of his embroidered muslin and organza dresses and 18th-century floral jacquard numbers were treated with crinkling effects to evoke a sense of “poor,” which means something quite different in Moralioglu’s dainty world than it does to the rest of us. But within the folds of those fabrics, there was a feeling of resourcefulness, which illustrated the idea of beauty in a time of uncertainty.
Some pieces looked as if they’d been spliced with other pieces, Nelson’s admiral jackets and grosgrain regalia had a scent of thriftiness about them, and opera coats seemed to morph into khaki utility-wear. Then, a sturdy denim bottom popped up, posing as a chic pencil skirt.
21 September 2020
Emerging from lockdown into the lushness of the English countryside—that far-off dream has become a reality, at least through the forest portal that Erdem Moralioglu has created for his pre-spring collection. “We went to a place on the outskirts of Epping Forest, which is on the edge of London,” he relates. “It’s a body of work made entirely during lockdown. I can’t say how satisfying it’s been to see it all come together, the feeling of being back doing what we do.”The designer had managed to buy his fabrics before the March cutoff. “We did the fittings on Zoom calls, with people from my studio in their homes, one on a houseboat, sewing on pearls,” he says. Now, Moralioglu’s store in South Audley Street has also reopened, operating with all the safeguards imposed by new British regulations for “nonessential” retail.The gritted-teeth determination to weave romance from scant resources, and in the face of adversity, has been in Moralioglu’s character since the beginning of his business in one windowless room 15 years ago. He kept it up in the time of COVID-19, and his creative escape hatch is a collection which draws on the juxtaposition of Regency dress and the 1960s. “I felt there was a synergy between those times,” he says. “They’re centuries apart, but they were both times of revolution, experimentation, and progress.”That’s another Erdem-ism: looking into history to draw subtle parallels with the current state of the world. Would you be carrying this political messaging upon your body, should you choose to invest in his classical goddess-like caped dress, shimmering with sheer sequins? Would you be spiritually wo-manning the barricades in a corduroy suit with a dandyish ruffled shirt? Narratives and character-conjuring are essential fuel for Moralioglu’s creative energies, but, he says, “whether or not people can understand that becomes irrelevant. What’s important is the emotional attachment people form with clothes, that they have a permanence to them over five, 10, 15 years. Holding onto your clothes—maybe we’re moving towards that.”Seasonless-ness is one of the topics of these times, and who knows how that concept will transform the way fashion operates? In the meantime, Erdem’s collection is accompanied by a kind of teaser in video form. He shot it with a tiny crew, with all the correct social distancing and sanitizing protocols necessary to do anything these days.
It’s enigmatic, all this communing with nature in the leafy English undergrowth, but it also suggests that Erdem might well be one of those designers who is in the process of discovering even better, deeper—and, yes, more long-lasting—avenues to explore in bringing his characters alive onscreen than in the traditional runway format.
24 June 2020
“She was an anti-fascist who fought against racism...a journalist, poet, muse; completely ahead of her time.” Erdem Moralioglu is speaking about Nancy Cunard, the heiress to the cruise line, whose portrait he came across with Robin Muir at the “Cecil Beaton: Bright Young Things” exhibition, now hanging locked in at London’s National Portrait Gallery. After being thrown on the violent switchback of time and events, this pre-fall collection has now landed with unforeseeable prescience in the summer of 2020. “It’s so weird” Moralioglu said, “because I designed it last winter.” Weird, because long before the pandemic and the last week’s explosion of outrage against racism, these lovely, delicate, floral clothes—Watteau-backed here, flounced there—were inspired by a woman who chose to use her immense white privilege and wealth to oppose the rise of fascism and support the work of black artists and writers.Well, Moralioglu has a record for submerging complex, rebel women and subversively timely histories amongst his fil-coupés, airy organzas, and rose prints. In fall 2017, at the outbreak of the migrant crisis in Europe, he reminded people of his half-Turkish heritage; last summer he spoke about the artist and communist activist Tina Modotti. Whatever drew him to Cunard, via Beaton, might have been what the photographer saw: her strong, wraithlike style, her turbans and bangles, her graphic-visual originality. Really, beyond the echo of a few jeweled aviator bonnets here, you wouldn’t connect the dots back to Cunard.But they’re worth following, especially in the context of what happened after 1928, when she—a socialite in Surrealist intellectual circles—met the African American jazz pianist Henry Crowder. “Henry made me,” she once wrote. Crowder instructed Cunard about American racism, introduced her to Harlem, and assisted her publishing house, The Hours Press. Cunard’s epic survey of black culture,Negro Anthology(1934) with contributions from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston has been recognized by Brent Hayes Edwards, the Columbia University professor of English, as being an early proponent of the understanding of black transnationalism.In the conclusion of Erdem’s press release, Cunard’s influence becomes a generalized characterization of a muse, a projection, perhaps, onto the kind of women who will buy his clothes. “Until recently, her nobility defined her identity; now she is defined by her principles, not just her privilege.
” In a time such as this, that reads more pointedly than ever.
8 June 2020
Erdem Moralioglu and Cecil Beaton—what kismet occurred at the National Portrait Gallery for London’s most romantic history-researching designer. Learning thatCecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things,a show of his ’20s and ’30s portraits of dazzlingly glamorous socialites, is opening at the gallery in March meant that Erdem’s inspiration was right there. He has a long-standing relationship with the gallery, where he has shown before. This season he slicked the runway with silver foil for his Beaton-referencing collection.Comparisons between the 1920s and the 2020s are beginning to surface in fashion—the Deco geometrics, the glitter. For Erdem, the resonances were personal, lodged in the knowledge of how Cecil Beaton first photographed his sisters Baba and Nancy, dressing them, rigging up sets at home, and making his fantasies come true. “It spoke to me, because in his early years he created who he would become. He wasn’t born into that family of aristocracy. He wasn’t a socialite; he was a middle-class kid with parents who had boring middle-class backgrounds,” said Moralioglu. “It reminded me of how I photographed my sister, Sara, up against the wall in our basement, with a disposable camera, and then had those pictures printed to make up my portfolio application for Ryerson University.”Ryerson, in Toronto, was the designer’s first step out of suburban Montreal, and thence to the Royal College of Art in London—and to where he is now as a self-made independent. Some of his takings from Beaton were literal. Look one, a black slicker mackintosh, was directly in honor of a photo of the aesthete Stephen Tennant, known as “the brightest of the Bright Young Things.” And then there was a direct replication of the pearl-festooned flapper dress (look 30), “in which Beaton photographed himself,” said Moralioglu.Tissue lamé and silvery lace dresses ensued. There were also black-and-white checkerboard prints inspired by Beaton’s early backdrops, echoes of the celluloid frills and fancy-dress rose-strewn brocades, and a nod to the Pierrot pajama suit that was one of the photographer’s role-playing costumes.It wasn’t a completely nostalgic trip into Jazz Age youth hysteria. The bias-cut satin dresses—one the color of absinthe—had an air of the ’30s or ’40s, but with a simplicity that will make them a hit with modern girls. Moralioglu designs with the lifestyles of girls and women of the 2020s in mind.
Arguably, they like prettiness and romance just as much as their grandmothers and great-grandmothers did a century ago, when postwar optimism was at a high and new freedoms for modern women first appeared to be in sight. Parallels between then and now can be debated, but there’s one old-society anachronism which doesn’t carry over. The more today’s 21st-century women see fake fur and plastic on runways, the more definitely it appears to belong to the past.
17 February 2020
A few things scrolled up as a mental sidebar while watching Erdem’s show—some of those general observations that start to crystallize at this stage of the season. One: the almost complete disappearance of the waist. Two: the mass conversion of women to ankle-length skirts for every moment of the day (as amply demonstrated by many showgoers). Three: the arrival of single, retina-vibrating jolts of color in outfits—and the special art of splashing on a clash with a scarf or suchlike.Erdem Moralioglu’s collection tied all of the above together as his as a long, stately procession of women began to tread on platform sandals along the gravel of a wide, tree-lined path in a London square. Seeing them silhouetted against the green led to yet another thought: how perfectly they fit into the scenery, like guests at a particularly well-dressed summer wedding.This socially attuned design is, of course, Erdem’s talent (his own wedding to Philip Joseph a couple of weeks ago was a fully begowned affair), but he always arrives at his collections through the biographies of particular people. This time, it was the multi-episodic life of Tina Modotti, whom he characterized as “a romantic and revolutionary, a woman of principle. Each outfit was like a postcard from a part of her life.”Stylistically, what fascinated him was studying Modotti’s phases. Born in Italy, she became a silent movie actress in Hollywood and a photographer and communist in Mexico (she traveled to Russia with the Mexican Communist Party), before meeting an early death in suspicious circumstances. “She found a cause that she believed was right, fought for it, and eventually suffered the biggest consequence,” he said.The pictures of Modotti’s life inspired Erdem’s voluminous proportions, the exaggerated shape of yoke blouses, rose embroideries, and the fringed shawls he tailored to sit on the shoulders without slipping. “It was the waistless-ness, tiers, the combination of Victorian dress and traditional dress that interested me,” he said. As for the pops of color? Erdem had spent time at the Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City. Photos of the interior were pinned on his inspiration board. “The amazing, saturated cardamom, yellows, and pinks,” he enthused.
16 September 2019
Erdem Moralioglu took the vague theme of historical echoes for his Resort collection. The notion of one decade looking at another cropped up as he was watching Visconti’sL’Innocente: “Interesting because it was made in 1978, I liked the way they saw the 19th-century Belle Epoque costumes,” he said. “But things get less weighed down in theory with pre-collections. It also just took me on to thinking about the ’70s, tunics over trousers, all the things women did to style themselves with scarves in those days. And then there’s the Madonna thread in these pictures.” What, Madonna?It turns out that Erdem designed the original version of the lace and polka-dot dress in this collection for a recent award show performance. She wore a couple of things made by him in it, thanks to Ibrahim Kamara, the young, visionary London stylist. Erdem’s lookbook, with all its typically eccentric “twinning” of models, was a collaboration with Kamara too; they worked together with the young photographer Sam Rock to create the sense of madcap, frenetic energy and movement in the poses of the girls as they work their floral prints, billowy sleeves, and headwraps.It may be an interim collection, which needs to show range and variety, but there’s no less Erdem-esque elaboration and magic going on in touches like his penchant for oversize bows, printed tights to match dresses, and, lately, polka dots. What stands out most is the grand fabulosity of his holiday party dresses—particularly the paired versions, one white, one black, of a high-waisted zigzag lace-trimmed dress, and finally the dreamy, demi-caped chiffon scattered with minute polka dots, whose delicacy can only be described as a confection.
6 June 2019
The designers who play to operatic volumes and embellishment are having the time of their lives at the moment. Erdem Moralioglu has been a lead voice in that choir from his beginnings as a designer—as a matter of fact, he was more of a soloist in London at that time. Now the unbound extravaganza of fabulousness which Pierpaolo Piccioli has brought to Valentino since he took over the reins has created an atmosphere in which young designers—like Moralioglu—are going full throttle.And so, by pure coincidence, to Italy, where Moralioglu happened to fall in love with the complicated life story of Principessa Orietta Doria Pamphilj (1920–2000), who turned into his Fall heroine. He became totally absorbed in her story—her early life was broken apart when her father was arrested for resisting Mussolini’s Fascism—when he was introduced to her son, Jonathan. Visiting the 1,000-room palazzo she lived in as the sole inheritor of vast dynastic wealth, the designer became obsessed “with how we deal with what happened in the past, and how we move forward with it.”There were richly romantic results, as Moralioglu began to imagine the principessa’s visit to London in 1963—a clash of aristocratic grandeur and the early youthquake of the Swinging Sixties. He took inspiration from the furnishings, paintings and wallpaper of the family palazzo for his extravagant brocades and florals, mixed with a note of Catholic mourning and the tales he heard of Pamphilj’s troubles during the war.There were bubble dresses and bows galore, sweeping trains and gleaming ostrich-feathered embroideries. Where were the English ’60s? Maybe in the hints of Mary Quant’s early use of groovy lace tights, tweeds, and kinky leather boots. The innocent, virginal fashion for upstanding frilly collars had a lovely moment in a white chiffon tiered dress with a row of black velvet ribbons. Moralioglu scripted in the story of how the principessa wore her jewels on the inside of her jackets at one point, and the fact that she ordered a wedding dress patterned in black roses, out of respect for her deceased father.Richness, gorgeousness, formality and a touch of darkness—it was an Erdem character-led fantasy at its best.
18 February 2019
Erdem Moralioglu’s progress around the great art establishments of London town has arrived this season at the life-drawing studio of The Royal Academy of Arts in Piccadilly. Look about behind the models: There you’ll glimpse the purpose-built Georgian benches and the plaster casts of Greco-Roman sculpture stacked on shelves in the oldest art school in Britain, founded 350 years ago, in 1768 (you can smell the oil paint in here—it’s still very much going). Erdem has one of his subtle hidden purposes for bringing our attention to the place. Because—guess what?—there were three centuries when women were not allowed in here to draw the naked human form. Not until Laura Knight was made the first full Royal Academician, just as British women were finally getting the vote (well, some of them), in 1918. Knight’s paintings were all over his mood board—herSelf-Portraitin which she shows a back view of herself painting a nude model—as well as documentary photographs, fashion illustrations, and memorabilia leading up to the Second World War.“I was thinking about her more in the ’40s, really,” the designer related, pointing out the padded shoulders, belted waists, and floral dresses, as well as the quirky turbans he commissioned from his longtime millinery collaborator Noel Stewart, with whom he became friends when they were students at The Royal College of Art. It all goes back to art school with Erdem—and his research in libraries, bookstores, and galleries. Knight, he pointed out, was commissioned as a war artist; she documented the lives of women at work in the military, and eventually (harrowingly) the Nuremberg trials. There were also more practical Blitz-period trouser suits, a jumpsuit, and a couple of sober tailored coats.One day it would be wonderful to see Erdem costume a movie; he’s already won a Design Museum award for his Royal Ballet costumes this year. That, though, would require significant time off from the treadmill of fashion (not that he ever complains). You always sense the necessity to him of finding a narrative, chasing a person or the spirit of a time in his work. Even if it ultimately results in looking nothing much like his storytelling, he knows how he got to making those beautiful creations: mercurial sequin poured on white lace, floaty high-waisted print dresses, quirky rose-printed tights. They’re done with at least as much conviction and finesse as his runway collection, that’s safe to say.
Still: Look, it’s nearly the holidays! There’s another collection to do just around the corner in February, and you can bet your life that Erdem will already have written his next artistic script by now.
4 December 2018
The material for Erdem Moralioglu’s narrative fell into his lap this season. He and his partner, Philip Joseph, have recently bought a house in Bloomsbury, “and there was a plaque around the corner dedicated to two sisters, Stella and Fanny, who in fact were Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, who lived as women in the 1860s.” Perfect fit! Historical research is Moralioglu’s creative lifeblood—he must have narratives—and this chance clue led him to a collection of rich Victoriana references, full of current resonances with today’s politics of gender self-identification.Fanny and Stella, retrospectively honored as heroines of queer London in that plaque, were very publicly out and about in Victorian nightlife. In 1870, the notorious ladies were arrested leaving the Strand Theatre and charged with “conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offense”—although they were later acquitted. (A side outrage was that they insisted on using the ladies’ lavatories, a familiar flash point today.) Moralioglu showed in the National Portrait Gallery, whose curators gave him access to the photography archive, where he uncovered yet more characters of the Victorian stage, female entertainers who dressed as men. “Far beyond any perceived thrill of cross-dressing,” he wrote in his press notes, “these were individuals with the courage to explore the power of self-expression.” He also pointed to comparisons with the counterculture of ’90s clubland, one of the constant wellsprings of fashion creativity to this day.It was hilariously subversive that he chose the Victorian gallery for his gorgeous show, parading his ode to sexual freedoms right under the noses of Victoria and Albert, and other portraits of the leaders of the British Empire.One way or another, London designers are showing their resistance to the forces of right-wing conservatism. In Moralioglu’s book, it was a reason to give full rein to all his signature penchants—puffed sleeves, velvet brocades, fragile boudoir satin and lace, gorgeously sweeping gowns. Noel Stewart, his milliner friend, supplied the veiled hats that evoked the shielded mystery of glamorous creatures moving through society by day or night.The clothes ticked all the boxes which will satisfy his loyal customers—trouser suits, decorative coats, amazing evening dresses. But how inspiring it was to see this champion of old-school romance using his influence to uphold freedoms that matter so much today.
17 September 2018
It’s easy to lapse into a semi-dream state when studying Erdem’s clothes. Particularly this season, somehow: He’s captured something oddly evocative in the drifting of point d’esprit, the flow of flowery fabrics, the slightly out-of-focus fluffiness of feathery headdresses. It’s “only” a Resort collection of course—one never destined to walk a runway, at that—but this designer is not one to execute anything by halves. Almost, you could say he’s redoubled what he does, here, by shooting everything in nonidentical pairs rather than duplicates.Here’s an idle thought: Is that doubling-up anything to do with the fact that Erdem is a twin—who is engaged to be married to a twin who has twin brothers and twin nieces? In fact, Twinniness was part of his story. In his large, duck-egg-blue office in London’s East End, the designer had propped up his inspiration boards as background information. One of the photos he’d pinned there was Diane Arbus’s famous image of twin girls, among a collage that also included work by William Eggleston and blurry imaginary portraits of young women by the contemporary painter Kaye Donachie (whose work Erdem collects). Okay, there is no literal correlation with the clothes, but they’re all apiece with the psychological landscape he’s created and populated with girls going to and fro, wearing lists of lovely attire. This season, the standouts? A short trapeze dress with a caped back. A pink and silver brocade bustier gown with detachable balloon sleeves. The long, polka-dotted chiffon romantic things with their empire, ribbon-tied waists. And, then, a bit of a surprise among all the double acts: two trouser suits with radically differing cuts, one wide, one neatly tailored. Each as compelling as the other.
7 June 2018
What a treat to be able to sit in London’s National Portrait Gallery to see Erdem Moralioglu sketching his latest character study of a woman—but who was the owner of this delightful wardrobe of tweeds, velvets, and shimmering dresses? Not an imaginary person this time, but someone real—the dazzling American vaudeville child star Adele Astaire, who married the son of the Duke of Devonshire. “She was Fred’s elder sister and the much more talented one. She was completely independent and then married into this very formal aristocratic family,” Erdem related. “It wasn’t [something that was done] then, but she even delayed her engagement so she could do one more show. She gave up her career and disappeared into Lismore Castle in Ireland. I became obsessed with this girl and I kept coming back to the idea of her—such a showgirl—imagining her in her tweed and her glitzy star-spangled capes, traipsing the moors. Or, if she wore her flapper dresses with something belonging to her husband.”Erdem didn’t mention how he’d stumbled on the story of Adele while taking part in the “House Style” exhibition at Chatsworth House last year; he’s recently been back up to the Derbyshire estate to research more about what happened before and after Adele’s husband had died—young and of drink. “I felt there was something quite beautiful about how the love affair was so short,” he mused.That would explain the black-dotted tulle veils at the beginning, then: a hint of mourning. In fact, as Laura Burlington, who co-curated “House Style,” pointed out, Adele also lost two babies in childbirth. Laura, who is married to the present duke’s son and wears Erdem (in her former career as a buyer at the Bluebird store, she was one of the first to sell his clothes), was there in the front row, enjoying the resonances in the beautiful panne velvet bejeweled dresses, the ’20s silver sequins (evoking Cecil Beaton’s shimmery portrait of Adele), and the renditions of sensible grouse-moor estate tweed skirtsuits.Laura and her parents-in-law invited Erdem to stay and immerse himself in the archive of Adele’s life, including film footage of her that “nobody realized was in the house until 18 months ago,” and go through the pages of fan’s albums of press clippings about the dazzling child-celebrity sister-and-brother act in the 1910s and ’20s. Adele’s escapades in meeting and marrying into one of the grandest dynasties of Britain are part of family legend.
Fizzy little American Adele was quite unfazed at the prospect of winning them over, Laura recounts: “When she was introduced to the aunts, who were putting on an intimidating front in the library, she came in and cartwheeled down the length of the room. And after that, they couldn’t not love her.”Well, nothing sets Erdem’s creative wheels whirring faster than a historical romance, an effervescence of eccentricity, and a shadow of psychological distress. If the sparkly Adele hadn’t existed, he would almost have had to make her up. The imaginary wardrobe he made in her image was a delight, from sensible day to dreamy night. As for the gallery setting? “I just loved thinking of this girl swishing through these narrow corridors . . . as if in a house.”(
19 February 2018
There’s an an eerie quality about some of the photographs in Erdem Moralioglu’s Pre-Fall lookbook, something about the models, who seem to hover almost like apparitions caught between day and dusk as the colors of their long dresses blaze in the last of the autumnal light. They were shot amid the rocks and standing on the bridge over the pond in the Kyoto Garden in Holland Park in west London. It gave the designer the ideal location to conjure up the spirit of his twin themes of the season. “I’d been thinking about Laura Ashley and Japanese artist Hokusai,” he said. “There was an exhibition about Hokusai at the British Museum recently, and then there is something I love about Laura Ashley.”It’s an odd coming together of influences, but the outcomes visibly land within Erdem’s domain of romanticism. Ashley’s influence—the high-waisted bodices, the English peasant-y flower prints, the patchwork and quilting—perfectly connects him with the bucolic-escapist Victoriana phase of the early ’70s, at which he excels. A trio of girls in blue printed “maxis” (as they were called back in the day) look like a very sophisticated set of Holly Hobbies, but no less magnetic for that. One wraith, standing alone, vies for the title of the best dress of this Erdem season: a long column of creamy charmeuse, with black lace trimming around a huge inverted triangular collar. (Should anyone be looking to dress a Karen Carpenter biopic, this would do nicely.)Where does theà la Japonaiscome in? In the tiny, formal flower prints, the chrysanthemum cloque fabric, the hint of kimono sashes, and the embroideries of birds flying over the hem of a trenchcoat. But who’s really counting? Just as apparent is the not-difficult-to-spot continuation of his fascination with the life of the young Queen Elizabeth II. Keeping on with the slightly ’40s silhouettes, with their draped satin shoulder lines or sequined puffed sleeves (which Wallis Simpson would have adored) and the circle-skirted ’50s silhouettes, was another wise move.
12 December 2017
The affection for Her Majesty the Queen among her British subjects knows no bounds. Nearly 65 years after ascending the throne in 1953, she’s had quite a year. At the age of 91, she has visited children who were terribly injured in the Manchester suicide bombing and the residents and families of the people of many cultures who died in the Grenfell Tower disaster in London. Now, curiosity about Elizabeth II as a human being—rather than a stiff royal cipher—is at an all-time high. Nothing illustrates that better than the Golden Globes–sweeping success of Netflix’s epicThe Crown. Claire Foy plays Elizabeth from the time of her coronation (at the age of 25) on. This summer, Erdem Moralıoğlu found his own extraordinary path into expressing his admiration for the queen while researching her clothes at Windsor Castle (no less). He conducted his research under the guidance of Caroline de Guitaut, the senior curator of decorative arts of the Royal Collection. There, he made a discovery which blew his mind, kindling a theme for a beautiful collection based on the 1950s that touched on a personal connection to Black-American culture in the young queen’s life. “It felt kind of important at a weird time like this,” said the designer. “The exchange between two worlds felt really beautiful.”Erdem had discovered that Elizabeth enjoyed jazz and dancing when she was young, and that she had met Duke Ellington in 1958 at a royal command performance. “It was at a theater in Leeds,” he said, pointing out a photo of the queen—wearing a tiara, a cream brocade Norman Hartnell evening gown, and white opera gloves—meeting the duke of jazz in a reception line. Ellington was so taken, he composed a piece for her called “Queen’s Suite.” “She had one record of it and he the other, which got lost in the Smithsonian until 2012. It’s sort of a piece of love poetry, really,” Erdem reflected. “She wrote him a note where she said, ‘I’ll be listening.’”After absorbing that information, he made the leap to Harlem in the 1950s, designing into the fantasy that the young royal might have visited the Cotton Club to watch Dorothy Dandridge, Billie Holiday, and Ella Fitzgerald perform. It made for quite gorgeous fashion, a context in which to show diverse beauty and an evocative set furnished as a glamorous Harlem Renaissance–era jazz club.There were brocade coats—fitted in front, with Watteau swinging in back—and variations on prim checked tailored coats.
Ribbons inspired by royal decorations became fastenings on bustier dresses or shoulder-bows. Pearl and gold embroideries of leeks and flowers imitated the symbols Hartnell planted in the queen’s coronation gown. The sinuous ’30s- and ’40s-chic dresses of the Cotton Club’s great singers contrasted with balloon-skirted ballgowns (an emerging trend of the season, there). Will the Queen be amused? She should be. It was a sincere tribute to a woman who has lived a life dedicated to duty and bringing people together. And it’s nice to know she’s had some fun along the way.
18 September 2017
Erdem Moralioglu was at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire for the grandly glamorous opening of the “House Style” exhibition earlier this year. Part of the reason was that a blue sequined dress of his had been placed by the curators (Lady Laura Burlington andVogue’s Hamish Bowles) in a stunning scenario that is given over to the glittering splendors of the lives—and the wives—of the dukes of Devonshire, going back six centuries. Moralioglu has his place there because both the present duchess and her daughter-in-law are among his customers, Burlington having been one of his first champions as a fashion buyer at The Bluebird store 10 years ago.That story sheds a telling side light on a secret virtue of Moralioglu’s design: how it crosses generations, fulfilling the need for beautiful, formal but unstuffy dresses for many sorts of women who have social occasions to host and attend. His is an empathetic, highly observational approach, as well as a romantic one—and naturally, all those qualities are at play again in his Resort collection. In a preview, he explained how he’d been looking into the worlds of two women artists of the 1930s and ’40s. Photographs of Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington and the collages of women by Dada artist Hannah Höch were on his walls, pinned up next to pictures ofJaponaisescreens and textiles painted with landscapes and birds.Those visual starting points are traceable in the flowery jacquard textiles and embroideries, the ’40s tea dresses, and the powder puff–feathered boas and jacket in this collection. Still, perhaps there’s more than a hint that his stay at Chatsworth is echoing, too. Ever an admirer of the grand tradition of English eccentricity, Moralioglu’s eye clearly zoomed in on something from the “House Style” exhibition. The late Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, had a penchant for diamond insect brooches, especially spiders. Look closely and you’ll see how that souvenir pops up in the bug-shaped jewelry, which will be appearing in his growing accessory collection very soon.
13 June 2017
As he was researching his Fall collection, Erdem Moralioglu dreamed up “an improbable meeting between two women, which could never have happened—[his] great-grandmothers.” He's not a political designer in the slightest, but his subject matter has particular poignancy now. Erdem’s mother was English; his father a Turkish chemical engineer. They raised their children (Erdem and his twin, Sara) in Montreal, Canada. After their parents passed away, the siblings were left with no visual evidence of the Turkish strand of their DNA, two generations back. Erdem explained, “We know they were from the east, east of Turkey. Near the Syrian border." Significant unhappiness has come to that region. War has caused the displacement of millions of refugees into Turkey and, consequently, throughout Europe. It's the site of one of the greatest geopolitical and humanitarian disasters of our time.Erdem’s clothes are never “unhappy”—they are more aptly classified as belonging to the uplifting and escapist tendency of fashion. His cinematic, imaginative realms are always historical. Still, everything is a choice. In electing to turn to Islamic references—the riches of the Ottoman Empire, photographs of sultans, and 18th- and 19th-century paintings of women splendidly bedecked in harems—Erdem points to the beauty of a whole civilization (and to his long-lost heritage, which is currently being vilified in the west).The Turkish thread certainly brought out beautiful effects: necklines, pom-pom trims, and embroideries borrowed from traditional folk costume; and thoughts about cotton voile and caftans. The English side of the Erdem identity—camel coats, florals, tea-dresses and guipure lace—is the more familiar. Yet, most beautiful of all the cross-pollinations was the meld of English flowers and Islamic miniature painting, which created a patchwork of prints on lovely silk velvet dresses. The show concluded with two exquisite long sequined dresses in purplish-blue with nothing apparently “in theme” about them—not that it detracted from them.
20 February 2017
Powder-puff marabou feather jackets tied at the neck with trailing satin bows. Silk linings sprigged with flowers. A hint of ’40s prints and the odd plunging sweetheart neckline, tinselly sequin pencil skirts, and platform shoes or pointy flats, swathed in brocade.Erdem Moralioglu’s between-season shows aren’t shows at all, but they’re even better as an experience if you’re lucky enough to be in the room when there’s one model, popping out from behind a screen in his tiny London showroom, and the designer is there, narrating. “I’ve been thinking about the ’40s as seen through the ’70s,” he said, while pointing out a scrapbook inspiration board that included stills of Bugsy Malone and Bertolucci’sThe Conformist, and a photo of the young Paloma Picasso wearing vintage glam, circa 1970.Storytelling is important to Moralioglu—the thing that always gets him going. But the advantage of a close-up viewing is being able to zoom in and witness his knack for translating the high-flown concept into his highly relatable form of romantic dressing. The trick is that his work is never so styled out that it veers into retro costume. That might mean a beautiful pink brocade dress with a flounced hem, shorter in the front, but whooshing voluminously in back, more rococo than ’70s or ’40s, but gorgeously effortless as a modern party dress. Or a black A-line midi skirt, embroidered with flowers that turns out to be made of leather, worn with a white cotton piqué short-sleeved shirt, which Moralioglu described (jokingly or not) as “practical.”He undertook this show-and-tell and at a rather momentous time, it transpired. The following day, his whole company was about to up sticks and move across London to a much bigger headquarters, set out across the spacious floors of a converted Victorian factory. All this has been done without ever taking one cent of outside investment. When Moralioglu walks into his new premises, it’s as an independent designer entrepreneur. In this day and age, that’s a massive achievement in itself.
28 November 2016
ProfessorErdem Moralioglugave an eloquent seminar on the fascinating background of his collection after his show. The usual jostling semicircle of iPhone-wielding journalists stood still for a moment as he recounted the story of how divers in the North Sea had recently surfaced with the drowned wardrobe of a lady-in-waiting for the wife of Charles I of England. We are talking about a wardrobe disaster of 1642, a ship sunk with its contents belonging to Jean Ker, Countess of Roxburghe, who was on a trip to the Netherlands for a top-secret mission to sell off some of the Crown Jewels on Queen Henrietta Maria’s behalf. The King was in desperate need of cash to pay his troops to fight the impending civil war at home. “She was a spy, really!” Moralioglu related, drawing breath. “Anyways! I thought, too, about the beach in Deauville, and then I imagined Jean Ker’s army of women landing there in the 1930s.” A pause before the conclusion: “Both the thirties and the 1640s were times [on the brink] of war.”Those were the whys and wherefores of a collection in which diamond clusters were secreted in seams and crevices of dresses; and silks were woven at Vanners, one of the oldest mills in England; and floral prints, on close inspection, included crowns and the Roman numeral XII—“because the ship which went down was the twelfth in the fleet.” At the beginning, the blue micro-flowered jacket, shown with pants and matching platforms, was a 17th-century inspiration taken from a visit to the Fashion Museum in Bath. The original has ribbons for fastenings, and Moralioglu took that haberdashery notion—in black grosgrain—to make shoulder straps (they hold up the plunging, off-the-shoulder dresses), as well as jacket fastenings.Does one need to know this treatise to appreciate the fashion Erdem put forth for next spring and summer with its very obviously wedding-appropriate white broderie anglaise floor-length dresses and its lovely varieties of the drifty floral frocks which every young and not-so-young woman seems to be wearing this fall? Obviously not, but knowledge is nourishing, and the enjoyment of chasing Professor Moralioglu’s references around the Internet is part of the pleasure of his work.
19 September 2016
There’s always one thing in anErdem Moralioglupre-collection that makes you look so hard, you almost stop hearing what he’s talking about. For Pre-Fall, it was an ostrich-feathered cape that looked as if it had sprung from the wardrobe of a silver-screen movie star. For Resort, it’s a look entirely made of striped blue-and-white men’s Swiss cotton shirting material: a blouse and a full-length skirt with a waterfall of tiered flounces in the back. Almost like an adapted Victorian petticoat or the beruffled back view of one of the ball-going ladies painter James Tissot specialized in in the 1880s, it’s exactly the kind of romantic Erdem-ism that makes you stop in your tracks and think: Lucky the girl who buys that!Victoriana-Edwardiana wasn’t the inspiration Erdem was speaking about as he showed this distractingly lovely outfit in a show-and-tell appointment at his store in South Audley Street in London—it was the trip to Japan he took last winter. “I spent the Christmas holidays there and traveled around to Kyoto and Naoshima,” he said, “which made me think again about the to-and-fro between Japanese culture and the West.” He had a pin board of street photographs of young Japanese girls in ’30s dresses (themodan garus, or go-ahead “modern girls,” who interpreted Parisian garçonne styles for themselves); shots of Mary Pickford in the 1915 silent movieMadame Butterfly; and a painting by G.H. Breitner of a girl asleep in a red kimono, among other things. Besides which, he talked about discovering the infinitely delicate art of Japanese papermaking, chanced upon in a store next door to a sushi restaurant in Kyoto.So there was a Mackintosh embroidered with blue-and-white anemones, vaguely reminiscent of a pattern from a lacquered screen; yellow and white lace dresses with scalloped edges inspired by decorative paper prints; and a kimono-shaped jacket. Nothing too overtlyà la Japonaise, really. No criticism there, though. The women and girls who flock to Erdem aren’t after themes and costumes, it’s just that brilliant talent he has for making a modern-romantic wardrobe so continuously wearable, season after season.
1 June 2016
Something is happening in fashion that is whirling us back to the 1930s and ’40s—times of tension and ensuing horror, when glamour and surrealism held out hopes and dreams on the silver screen.Erdemagain plunged us into that feeling as we sat—apparently backstage in a theater or on a movie lot—while a stream of girls passed by on the way to a notional audition. “I thought of them trying to put their best foot forward, of what they were trying to be, heading toward the lights and stardom—or not,” saidErdem Moralioglu. As an introduction, the soundtrack fromAll About Eve, echoing footsteps and terse conversation, filled the air. “It’s that scene where Bette Davis arrives late and realizes her part has been taken,” the designer added.Moralioglu is someone who can’t design without atmosphere and characters, but it’s his fix on the suppressed, turbulent emotions of young womanhood that prevents his work from tipping over into the realm of costume. Pragmatically, he also knows the characteristics of his many customers inside out. Pretty yet not saccharine, elaborate but never hampering, about sums it up—there’s always a feeling with his clothes that everything has to be able to be worn with boots or flats and walked around in easily.This season, the makings were inspired by “1920s shifts, ’30s bias-cut gowns, ’40s tailoring,” he said, while standing against a mood board pinned with photographs of Vivien Leigh, Gertrude Lawrence, and Lauren Bacall’s screen-test photos taken with hairstyle tryouts. “Look, she’s Betty,” he pointed out. “It’s before she became Lauren.”The narrative involved many dresses treated to the designer’s beautiful techniques: the delicate patchworking of lozenges of lace, glinting fil coupe fabrics, and panne velvet; a frayed black-and-white Linton tweed pantsuit; a deep green patterned princess coat with a small bodice, large lapels, and a generous skirt. Most arresting, though, was the moment of glory when the ingenue had most definitely passed through all her trials and struggles and been “discovered.” There she was, arriving at the theater decked in shoulder-hugging, flounced-edged capes in dark sequins or herringbone feathers, or walking toward her spot on the stage shimmering in a silver bias-cut ’30s dress with a flippy hem.
To build this temporary, imagined world, Moralioglu enlisted set designer Robin Brown, briefing him to supply chandeliers, antique furniture, urns, and scenery to re-create the look of an Oliver Messel design for opera or film. That reference dates back to the brief flowering of English surrealism between the wars—a time when fear was in the air and money scarce, but glamour and brave hopes could somehow became pasted together to offer an escape route to dreams. No wonder it’s all resonating now.
22 February 2016
“Can you imagine, 10 years, and here I am in Mayfair?” Yes,Erdem Moraliogluis indeed “receiving” at his South Audley Street establishment these days, kneeling at the feet of his fit model downstairs in the plush-modern, very personal store he opened only a couple of months ago. “I like pre-collections,” he declared, considering the girl standing there in a floor-length white lace dress encrusted with lustrous pale blue and gold silk blooms. “Something always tends to come out of them that turns into an idea for the runway. But with pre-, I like to think these are kind of timeless dresses.”A decade to rise from being a penniless graduate sewing in a subsidized shoe box of a studio to becoming the sole owner of a wildly thriving business—that’s a short time indeed. Yet even though Moralioglu may still be having waves of pinch-himself feelings about it, his unusual combination of romantic aesthetics and a sharp eye for the nuances of the social habits of his customers is on display all over this shop and in every stitch, ribbon, flower, flounce, and pouf that goes into his work. Or, in the case of Pre-Fall, ombré-dyed ostrich feather.This time, he claimed to have been thinking about the portraiture of John Singer Sargent, the painter who captured the frothy grandeur of the women and girls ensconced at the upper layer of wealthy Edwardian society. The models in his lookbook were cast, he said, to seem as if they were sisters. Serendipitously enough, exactly those kinds of people would have been perambulating up and down South Audley Street in the 1900s—they had endless occasions to dress for: coming-out balls, presentations at court, the multifarious social opportunities of the summer “season.” And so, in a broader context, it is today. Summer, as Moralioglu has noted, is full of events that, in 2016, are an open goal for designers who can contrive weightless, easy-to-carry-off ball gowns and modern formalwear. This is what this noticeably floor-sweeping collection was about: the Costume Institute Gala, the Cannes Film Festival, the Serpentine Gallery party, the opening of the Royal Academy summer exhibition, and zillions of weddings.
7 December 2015
Erdem’s first look said it all: A girl with a slightly trance-like expression on her pale face was treading her way along a red earth pathway, prettily dressed in a delicate Victoriana yoked dress of pale gray chiffon, strewn with embroidered pink and white flowers, which seemed to be coming apart at the shoulders. So far, so enchanting—but what the designer said about his inspiration will make you go back and take a long second look: “It was about prairie madness,” he explained backstage. “In 1862, Abraham Lincoln passed the Homestead Act, which gave single women and widows the right to their own plots of land in the West, as long as they stayed there for five years. So there were all these women coming from their homes in Europe, bringing their clothes and the remnants of their lives in Norway and Germany and places like that—and they started to suffer from agoraphobia and all kinds of psychological illnesses.” A quick Wikipedia check also shows that suicide was not uncommon among these lonely women. Could that black velvet ribbon at her neck, knotted and displaced to the side, start to look a little different in that light?Erdem’s productions have taken on an almost cinematic quality recently, often hinting at the backstories of imaginary girls and women who have fallen on hard times or traveled far from their secure homes. Last season, he placed his show in a down-at-the-heels ’50s apartment set belonging to an heiress whose hopes in life were unraveling; before that, it was a tropical greenhouse for a tale about a Victorian woman botanist. Part of this, he always says, comes from spending his boyhood obsessively watching Merchant Ivory films. He’s a romantic who can only design once he “knows” the character he’s dressing.The prairie girls, with their extraordinary wardrobes of ankle-length flounced dresses made of beautifully wrought lace, crochet, and embroidery fabrics, are his sequel. They arrived by railroad—pushed along on an actual train track in a former freight yard in the hinterland of King’s Cross station, with a few sticks of furniture to their names, and then proceeded to make their long, melancholy walk to a crackly soundtrack of Emily Dickinson’s poetry.Well, put it another way: Erdem may be brilliant at research and atmospherics, but in the real world he also knows the minds of the women he actually dresses. Next summer, they are basically going to be in prettiness heaven.
21 September 2015
Erdem Moralioglu was proudly showing off some flea market finds the other day—a Victorian photo album and a music box of the same vintage that played "God Save the Queen." The items cued an undercurrent in his Resort 2016 collection, what he called "the way that certain decades look at other eras, the 1960s looking at Victoriana, or the '70s looking at the '20s." Take one of the most simple yet striking pieces on show: a dress in a floral fil coupe. The Victorian details—a high collar, a white lace bib—were matched to a slim, drop-waist silhouette that was the essence of the Swinging '60s. Then Erdem added his own signature oddness: The fil coupe was inside out, the lace bib was raw-edged. So what looked at first glance to be quite prim and proper was, on closer inspection, slightly unhinged. If you needed backup for this first impression, it was right there on the mood board, where Goldie Hawn's arch kookiness shared space with Catherine Deneuve's sister Françoise Dorléac and Loulou de la Falaise in her pre-YSL days—every one of those women an embodiment of the '60s stylish iconoclasm.There was an edge of that spirit in Erdem's lineup. As fiercely disciplined as he is, he has proved himself a past master of knowing just when to let go. So a "waistless" (a word he used often when talking about the clothes) shift in black leather bonded to pink satin was embellished with a big ruffle that snaked around the dress. That same detail was a distinguishing feature on a white poplin blouse. Paired with black culottes, it was a severe counterpoint to the designer's signature florals. But even those flowers weren't straight up. What looked like embroidery on one dress turned out to be digital prints stitched onto the fabric. A sheer latex trench printed with flowers that were of no known genus was a standout piece. Erdem has truly mastered the dark floral arts in his embellishments.He loves that tension: the sweet, the slightly sinister. That's how a single story can embrace pretty pale gazars and laser-cut neoprenes. But for all that, what really stood out here was thecalmnessof the clothes. Despite the high necks, the clerical collars, the Swiss lace bibs, even the couture-ish gowns with the cape backs, this might have been Erdem's easiest collection yet. He even showed denim for the first time, needle-punched with a windowpane pattern.
And when he talked about "permanence," it was easy to imagine a flowing, tiered dress, lightly spaghetti-strapped at the shoulders, moving from this year's red carpet to next summer's garden party.
3 June 2015
Erdem Moralioglu has been doing some major building work on his East End home, so interiors must have been on his mind already when he encounteredThe Collector, an installation by Helly Nahmad Gallery at the Frieze Masters art fair last October. The installation was a detailed re-creation by production designer Robin Brown of an extravagantly overstuffed apartment belonging to a fictional Parisian art collector. (There was a photo of it in the small mood book handed out at Erdem's show.) Environment as an expression of character—the very idea was catnip to Moralioglu, because it translated so effortlessly to clothing. All he had to do was come up with the character.And that was what we saw today: the designer magicking up a muse, with Brown's assistance on a set that filled out her cluttered, disordered life. Fascinating, because it got to the heart of Moralioglu's creative process, maybe even revealing more than he'd care to about the way his mind works. Because his muse was a nut, a woman fallen on hard times, trailing clouds of faded glamour, shreds of privilege, delusional notions of her own capabilities. A dream to work with, in other words. Just as Billy Wilder found his Norma Desmond, Moralioglu wove an inspiring fashion fantasia out of his broken muse.His rich, complex fabrics have always been his strongest suit, but Moralioglu was pleasingly disrespectful with them in this new collection. He reversed his lavish jacquards, exposing a lurid underside, and then, when he'd cut them into proper little dresses or full-skirted party frocks, he frayed them, just as he frayed his tweeds (and then sewed on a little lace, to make the fray a little less hard-times). Needle-punching, fashion's shortcut to provocative narrative, was dazzlingly utilized in a camel coat blended with a rococo jacquard, an ocelot coat mixed with shaggy black shearling, and, for the finale, sporty knit sheaths punched into floor-sweeping fil coupe that had been randomly decked with ostrich plumes. It was surreally elegant.Erdem's Spring universe was a jungle hothouse. For Fall, that mood took on a more urban, earthbound tinge. Nicholas Kirkwood designed a riding boot to suit the looks, and there was something muchfunkierabout the colors, the proportions, the glimmers of skin. Maybe, in her ineffable wrongness, Moralioglu's imaginary muse had brought him closer to his own truth as a designer. It will be intriguing to see how hisrealwomen feel.
23 February 2015
Erdem Moralioglu has been having a very good run lately. In September he sent out a collection pretty much universally acclaimed as his best ever. And earlier this month Moralioglu was named Womenswear Designer of the Year by the BFC in London—an award soon followed by a splashy dinner celebrating Erdem at Art Basel in Miami Beach. What with the whirlwind tour of accolades, the pressure was on for Moralioglu to deliver another knockout performance this season—a pressure rather unfair, given that Pre-Fall isn't really the platform for that sort of thing. Consider the situation metaphorically: An actor has a breakthrough role in an epic Hollywood drama, and his next flick on the release calendar happens to be an offbeat chamber piece. You have to apply a different metric to measure the success.And this was very much an offbeat chamber piece of a collection. Pulling from a polyglot group of references—Diane Arbus' uncanny portraits of twins; Japanese graphics; Romy Schneider;Death in Venice—Moralioglu delivered a group of clothes that replaced the operatic romanticism of Spring '15 with a kind of macabre preppiness. Witness the fraying collar on a crepe peacoat, or mod white minidresses with Rorschach black embroidery. Feathers sprouted from a floral-embroidered dress. The snappiest looks here erred toward the youthful and graphic—dresses and knits in school-uniform red and navy, the crystal-crossed frocks and the ones done in a spectacular yet understated gray wool-silk check. Those looks were very appealing, but the collection reached a higher elevation when it conjured a more grown-up, aristocratic mood. Perhaps the standout look here was the trenchcoat in laser-cut felt, with a moody bonding of black lace. But the floral, pussy-bow gown was a close second, seductive and ghostly in its evanescence. Women don't often wonder what they'd like to wear if called on to haunt a stately home, but that gown would be perfect. And in that sense, this collection did indeed repeat Erdem's feat for Spring, insofar as it managed to merge creepy and beautiful in a signature, visually and texturally rich way. Whatever that vibe is, Erdem owns it now.
8 December 2014
On Erdem Moralioglu's mood board, there were pictures of Katharine Hepburn inThe African Queen,a proper woman "going bush," unhinged by the jungle. That was the set today: steamy, dark, slightly sinister. And that was also the scenario. Except that the woman Erdem had in mind was Victorian biologist and botanical artist Marianne North, who traveled the world and defined her profession to the point where there is a gallery dedicated to her at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, outside London. The linear architecture of greenhouses loaned itself to Erdem's ordered precision, as defined by the lines he embroidered into a quilted dress. Victorian propriety was beautifully embodied in a high-necked, mid-calf apron dress in virginal broderie anglaise. With another, more casual, it was almost as though a crocheted tablecloth had been wrapped and tacked down one side. There were dresses where lush greenery was gorgeously tamed in long, lustrous gowns.But Erdem compared that to "trapping something wild." And it was the wildness of nature, rather than its order, that truly absorbed him in this collection. A clutch of raw-edged tweeds was one way to express incipient chaos. So was the way that Nicholas Kirkwood's sandals snaked up the models' legs. Another was the steady encroachment of feathers and fronds—dense, overlaid, obsessively applied by hand. Minute pieces of cut chiffon were composed in camo-like floral patterns. Cockerel feathers sprouted from panels of riotous embroidery. The effect was lavish, but eerie. Like fashion voodoo. With Erdem as high priest.He obviously loves that stuff. The show ended with a string quartet's version of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind?" The classic and the chaotic, in one elegant, career-defining package.
15 September 2014
Erdem's Resort collection started out primly enough. Mr. Moralioglu was mulling over "codes of femininity": the polka dot, the ruffle, the flower—elements he's used over and over in the past. But then his inner voice was overpowered by a willful spirit of fabulous fashion vandalism. "How can I fuck them up?" he asked himself. OK, don't gettooexcited…Erdem's Resort was hardly the descent into delicious chaos his note to self implied, but his yen to mess with thingsdidproduce a couple of the best pieces he's ever shown—an overcoat with an engineered floral print that looked like it had been attacked with white paint and a tuxedo with the same effect, though it was more dipped than splashed. It was theroughnessof these things that made them so attractive. Likewise the polka dots, which were more like organic smears; the organza, whose florals seemed to be thickly outlined with black Magic Marker (actually embroidery); and the unlined, almost raggedy tweed coat worn inside out. Erdem mentioned as reference points the photographs of Alex Prager and Vivian Maier, with their sense of interrupted narrative. It was as though something violent had just happened to these clothes.And yet Erdem was also insisting that Resort is the most straightforward of collections for him: "It's where I really get an opportunity to explore who my woman is, by day, by night." That duality was exemplified in one dress that, coming, was a frothy mille-feuille of frayed white organza, and, going, was black crepe with a sturdy zip running up its spine. And it was also present in the feminine versus masculine aspect of a bib-front white lace dress, the tuxedo jackets that the designer casually draped over almost everything, and the footwear he favored. When you pair a dress in extravagantly ruffled gazar with brogues by Nicholas Kirkwood, oddness ensues.Erdem's pursuit of oddness—or "wrongness"—in his clothes would hardly bear mentioning again if it weren't for the fact that it yielded such major dividends this time round. His career seems to have developed a rhythm—one collection proposes precise, almost prissy perfection (the Eisenhower chic of this outing's navy jacquard dress and matching coat being one example), and the next takes it to pieces. Like the decoupaged guipure here. Or the casual iconoclasm of the eveningwear. A brocade silk gown was in a shade of lime so washed out that it could have spent hours in the rinse cycle.
Another dress was made from lace that mimicked sporty Airtex. Odd, but refreshingly so, because it was so unlikely. And that's Erdem at his best.
2 June 2014
The finale music sounded like Debbie Harry singing "Heart of Glass" over Michael Nyman's theme fromThe Piano.An aural culture clash maybe, but it was actually weirdly compatible. And weird compatibility might have been the theme of Erdem's new collection. He mashed French icons of sixties cool like Anna Karina and Betty Catroux together with seventeenth-century Velázquez infantas, eighteenth-century botanical prints, and Romanovs on the run from marauding Bolsheviks to create "an army of girls" (his words) he described as—what else—weird.If there was a unifying theme, it was, Erdem said, the idea of revolution. He tried the clean slate approach last season, and that didn't go too well for him. So it was no surprise to see a more familiar Erdem assert himself, at least in the girlish spirit of the collection: short flaring dresses, sparkly decoration, Nicholas Kirkwood flats. Smart move. But it was no mere retrenchment. If gilded guipure felt like a flashback, there was also croc-stamped black leather, in a short skirt over narrow pants. One of the most telling—and appealing—touches was the intricate botanical embroidery, an Erdem signature, which here had been left deliberately unfinished, so that brightly colored clumps of thread hung like feathers. It was almost as if the designer was saying "This is what I do, but I can un-do it, too."That sense of things falling apart nibbled at the rest of the collection. Some dresses gaped at shoulder and elbow, others looked like they'd been hit hard by a storm of small golden meteors. One of the most beautiful pieces was cut from dull gold silk woven with delicate blue flora. It was draped to one side, like it was not quite finished. An elegant reminder that every designer's career is a work in progress.
16 February 2014
Erdem Moralioglu did himself no favors by dressing his Spring Erdem collection as some kind of break with his past. The clothes were too obtuse to communicate a clear message. His Pre-Fall, on the other hand, had a crisp clarity that didn't need any verbiage from the designer. The collection was a sharp distillation of what people love about Erdem: exquisite cocktail dresses, eerie florals, a sweet-turned-sour sophistication. He said he imagined "a schoolgirl in a kilt wearing her grandmother's coat." There were paintings by Balthus and John Currin on his mood board that perfectly embodied that skewed notion. His mastery of propriety gone wrong found perfect expression in a kinky trench in forest-green eel skin. (Nicholas Kirkwood's pointy flats were the consummate accessory.) Same with a miniskirt in boiled wool crepe with matching bustier and, best of all, an asymmetrical slipdress in burgundy silk crepe, delicately suspended from spaghetti straps and embroidered with a big black dahlia. There are few flowers with such a bad vibe, and it was entirely in keeping with Moralioglu's twisty ethos that he would make it the motif of his collection. He is, after all, the guy who eternally exalts the "wrong" in his work.Curiously, the element he singled out here as most wrong was a clutch of pieces slathered in coppery sequins. They had a Halston-dresses-Liza jazziness, particularly the sequined top and tuxedo pants that were Erdem's alternate offering for evening. A little less formal maybe than the flower-embroidered column with the starchy white shirt collar ("glamorous governess" might once have been Erdem's classic default position), but then, de-formalized dressiness was actually the essence of the collection. The designer achieved this effect with a front-and-back proposition. A little black dress in macramé lace looked formal from the front, but in back, it sensuously molded to the spine with a neoprene-like jersey. A lace jumpsuit, backed in silk cady, sported a solid black T-shirt pocket. A little thing, you might think, but it undoubtedly defused the dressiness. And there was something that Moralioglu did with his cutting that was equally effective, sloping side seams forward so that the body's stance shifted slightly, emphasizing the hips. Simple, elegant, lovely.
10 December 2013
If his audience was bemused by the distinctly un-Erdem-like collection he presented today, Mr. Moralioglu himself was way ahead of them. "It's a departure," he declared before the show. "Leaving certain things out felt like freedom." So, with clean slates on his mind, Erdem looked to that ineffably English institution the public school for inspiration. But it wasn't so much posh rugger buggers storming around in a pubertal stew of hormones that he drew on to shape the nature of his new collection. Thank heavens for that small mercy. Rather, it was, as he put it, "rebels and jocks and nerds and boys who put their mothers' couture dresses over their school shirts." More Sebastian Flyte, in other words. Which explained at least one recurring theme in the show: the crisp cotton shirtdresses veiled in swaths of tulle.Cross-dressing teens don't immediately present themselves as an obvious wellspring for a designer who has dressed the wives of presidents and prime ministers. But Erdem has always been an intensely strange one. If the schoolboy (or girl-dressed-like-schoolboy) subtext insinuated itself inverysubliminal suggestions of a sweatshirt, a rugby shirt (there were stripes), or gym kit, what came across much more strongly—or perhaps "ethereally" is a more accurate descriptive—was a deep, plangent melancholy, helped along by the cellist and pianist who played center stage.True, the teenage years are a time of irrational highs and lows, and the organza shell tops that Erdem covered with scrawled poems by Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman certainly reflected that emotional roller coaster, but it was actually adult rituals like weddings and funerals that seemed more true to the monochrome mood of his presentation. In fact, front-row fan Alexa Chung said she felt like she'd seen clothes that offered the opportunity to dress as a bride and a widow in the same outfit. "The two sides of my brain," Erdem responded when he heard that. But even before the androgynous girl/boy school inspiration struck him, he insisted, the blankness of the white toiles in his studio had gripped his imagination. "Something ghosty," he said. "The woman is a shadow."And that is why, for all the obvious effort and the couture-worthy workmanship, this Erdem collection ultimately felt insubstantial, and overwhelmed by sadness.
15 September 2013
In contemporary fashion lingo, Resort conjures up an image of a leisured, slightly luxe getaway. For Erdem, it evoked something much closer to home this season. He found inspiration in his mother's old holiday snaps, where the getaway was more likely to be to a bed-and-breakfast in Blackpool: net curtains, Formica floors, "naff" fifties patterns on upholstery and wallpaper. It was a curiously downbeat launchpad for a designer whose clothes are more typically the embodiment of dressed-up precision, and yet it seemed to free Erdem to forge on into bold new territory, for him at least. "Fall was so nipped and tense," he said of his last collection. Here, that tension evaporated in the refreshingly slouchy simplicity of baggy pants paired with an oversize tee, or a utilitarian boilersuit, or an oversize jumper worn with a skirt abbreviated at mid-thigh. Erdem's princess had been infected by an air of untucked tomboyishness. "That dual girl-boy element just felt right," he said, even if his bemused tone suggested he wasn't quite sure why.But the "why" was quite clear in the effervescent essence of the clothes themselves. If Blackpool in the fifties was on his mind, it was, mercifully, another time and place that came through: The big loose shirt over slacks, with pointy bowed little flats, could have been Babe Paley on holiday…or Gidget on the beach. Of course, this being Erdem, that shirt came in an exquisite gazar, just like the baggy pants were in silk cady, the tee organza, the boilersuit washed satin, and the miniskirt a buttery leather.But the ghost of Blackpool artfully hovered. The transparency of lace and organza was, in Erdem's mind, suggestive of the sheer curtains of the small hotels where his mum might have stayed on her holidays. Likewise, the jacquards echoed the patterns of wallpaper and seaside tearoom tablecloths. In that light, a sinister green tweed felt like a weird take on uptight fifties matrons. Such unpromising reference points should by rights add up to something dour, even grim, but Erdem is, after all, a designer who repeatedly insists that nothing is as right as when it's "wrong," so it wasn't really surprising when he claimed the downbeat as experimental threads in a liberated new outlook.
And it was ultimately less "wrongness" than an absolutely upbeat rightness that defined a floral-print cotton shift whose streamlined freshness actually evoked the gorgeous Jean Shrimpton in her earliest photographs with David Bailey, just before the sixties really started to swing. Nicholas Kirkwood's flats and Linda Farrow's slightly sci-fi sunglasses beautifully elaborated on the mood.
2 June 2013
Erdem Moralioglu has always loved color, always been scared of the dark. But this is clearly a season of reinvention in London because, like Mary Katrantzou yesterday, he shelved the color and crossed to the dark side with his new collection. The conceptual shift promised to be as stark as the first look—a black tweed shift with a black tulle underskirt. It carried over to the hair (down, an Erdem first) and the footwear (flat, pointy, a Nicholas Kirkwood first).But first impressions can be deceptive. As the show rolled on, it became increasingly clear that black has at least as many shades as gray, and Erdem's vaunted facility with fabrics offered him a means to explore them all. He had been watching Ingmar Bergman'sPersonaand became absorbed with the idea of duality, translating it into his fashion as "the unhinged and the proper in the same outfit." Though this face-off has often been present in his collections, saving his designs from the tweeness of propriety, it was graphic today in the split personality of an all-black outfit that had paillettes in front, duchesse satin in back. A tweedy coat shot through with a spidery green windowpane pattern that was alive with wayward strands of ostrich feather turned around to reveal shiny black patent. The contrast of texture, tone, and surface had a gothic intensity, even more extreme in a black lace dress clotted with black velvet roses, or a cocoon of white ostrich feathers trapped under a shroud of black chiffon. Purity besmirched—no wonder the show closed with a burst of the music fromPsycho,another masterpiece of duality.Erdem loves Hitchcock. He identifies with the director's subversive wit. That much was clear from the treatment that traditional feminine codes received today. Florals? Against the black, they took on a toxic tinge. Polka dots? Erdem showed them as holes punched into bonded neoprene. There was something slyly funny about that. Makes you wonder—now that Erdem is no longer afraid of the dark, what bête noire will he take on next?
17 February 2013
According to Erdem Moralioglu, the sexiest part of a woman's body is her collarbone. His pre-fall collection put it on show: strapless dresses, obviously, but also pieces yoked in sheer organza and provocative PVC. After spicing up Spring with snakeskin, Erdem turned to plastic and leather to give his latest designs the requisite…no, let's not saywrongnessyet again…let's opt forincorrectnessthis time 'round. That was his word. The need to create a sense of jarring disturbance is clearly an obsession with the designer, like it's something he requires to balance out his equally obsessive precision and perfectionism. Here, the results were so sophisticated but so peculiar that they left you craving a taste of whatever it was that spiked the punch at Erdem's cocktail party.That PVC, for example, mounted with crepe cutouts in a psychedelic Prince of Wales check. Or the sheath in a tensile organza-backed, jeweled netting, vibrating over a black bra and slip. Or the tulle-yoked frock in a navy leatherbroderie anglaise. Or another dress raw-cut from pink silk, green crepe, and navy lace bonded to create one techno-organic cloth. Erdem's ever-growing technical acuity was clearest in these odd but unforgettable fabrics. He claimed that was the point: simple silhouettes whose impact was dramatically concentrated on texture and color. One short-sleeved floor-sweeper, shaded in a deep petrol splashed with sick pink, said it all. These were clothes you'd expect to find on the backs of Erdem's favorite psychological subjects, immaculately collar-boned Hitchcock blondes and their Italian cousin (Monica Vitti inRed Desert). When he veered away from that kind of clarity—with a boxy, angora-collared suit in a lamé tweed, for instance—his hand wasn't quite so sure. There is, after all, always the risk that obsession will breed excess. On the other hand, excess looked rather splendid in a dress of floral silk crepe overlaid with huge paillettes dyed to match, like giant fish scales.
17 December 2012
The feeling gets stronger with every new collection from Erdem Moralioglu. The boy is dead keen to push the super-controlled envelope he's created for himself. The inspiration for his new collection was the work of Zenna Henderson, one of the first female sci-fi writers. She created a mythos based on The People, alien refugees from a distant planet. Erdem imagined the women trying to fit in on Earth, but remaining perpetually outside. He patchworked his signature lace with python to suggest a reptilian Otherness. And he created what he called "uncomfortable color combinations," blending pastels with the lurid tones of a toxic spill. It was actually the color palette that best conveyed the Otherness of Erdem's scenario. The lurid nuclear-orange flowers embroidered on a pristine lace background were exactly the sort of "wrong" he is always talking about. But he also explored the idea with the nothing-is-quite-what-it-seems quality of organza-veiled jacquards and brocades, and python masquerading as glazed silk mikado, or the illusion of lace that was actually hand-embroidered PVC.While working with a Swiss embroidery company on this collection, Erdem found himself delving into their archives from the fifties. It was that era's shapes that ended up defining the collection: full skirts with nipped waists, strapless sheaths, shifts, shirtdresses, box pleats. Henderson wrote about her People in the 1950s. Perhaps it's simple coincidence Erdem landed in the same time frame. Or maybe it's a testament to his complete union of style and substance. In dressing his Women Who Fell to Earth, he may have sublimated the weirdness of his story in favor of the gorgeous precision that has become a virtual Erdem cliché. His followers will be thankful for that. But the rest of us—and maybe even the designer himself—were grateful today that the weirdness lingered, like an ethereal perfume.
16 September 2012
Erdem Moralioglu's designs recently crossed over into the heady realm of wronged-woman court attire, courtesy of the floral dress worn by Linda Evangelista on the last day of her child support hearing in Manhattan. It felt sorightfor the Erdem ethos: an outfit proper enough to persuade a judge, but with an undercurrent of emotional excess. Of course, "rightness" isn't an Erdem ideal. As he talked through his new pre-collection yesterday, he was clearly still enraptured by the wrong. Acid pink lace appliquéd to a black neoprene sheath certainly filled that requirement, as did a serious coat—its tweed threaded with gold lamé—whose collar and cuffs were crusted with distinctly unserious plastic flowers and doodads. "Scooby-Doo inserts," Erdem called them. "It's always so tasteful and controlled. Mixing in the gummy plastic things felt new."Did that hint of control-related ennui imply a designer on the brink of a breakout? Not really. Propriety still ruled, even if its grip on the collection wavered here and there. Erdem cited the Amish as a starting point, as well as a photo essay calledLas Mujeres Flores, about a German settlement in Mexico. (His bookshelves are always laden with such fascinating ephemera.) What both shared was the idea of a closed world where craftsmanship thrives, a little like haute couture, actually. In fact, Erdem joked that his collection was Amish couture. "There's a human hand to it," he added. "That's what I find interesting."The reference was most obvious in the hexagonal patchworking that recalled Amish quilts, but if that sounds just about as proper as proper gets, consider that it was most striking in the weird glamour of a midnight navy suit: tone-on-tone lace appliqué, worn-looking lamé sleeves, and big jeweled buttons that glittered darkly. Perhaps it was the folksiness of the patchwork contrasted with the sophistication of the components that made a shift stitched from hexagons of tweed and silk crepe jacquard appear so unhinged. The patchwork looked heavy, especially in comparison to the airy charm of something like a cotton poplin blouse with a print in Venetian blue that could have been rococo Rorschach blots. Erdem likes the tension of opposites, but here, heavy and light were pulling too hard. All that crepe contributed to a retro mood. (Even Erdem's first foray into bathing suits had a fifties squareness.
) Looking for something breezier, there were sweater and skirt sets, those languid gowns will always be winners, and, ultimately, Erdem's pursuit of the off-kilter can't help but yield a peculiar beauty.
21 May 2012
It's not just because today's venue, the new White Cube gallery space in South London, was so spectacular that you might think the art world serves Erdem Moralioglu well. Last Fall's scenario of the spurned lover who takes fierce revenge on her artist boyfriend was the basis of a breakthrough collection for him. This Fall, his woman had moved on. Now, he said, she buys art rather than destroys it. But she was still a creature of dark, distinctly adult appetites, and that made her—and her style—infinitely more interesting than the pretty-girl Lolita-land that Erdem entered for Spring.It also offered him some provocative new elements to play with in his ongoing pursuit of thewrongin his work. Black rubber, for instance, the kind you'd buy in a sex shop, but delicately embroidered with lace, or used as a laminate for classic tweed. The proper made improper—so wrong, and Erdem loved how it unsettled him. He mentioned Hitchcock again, but a more appropriate cinematic reference might be Hitchcock's more lurid disciple Brian De Palma, exercising perfect control over random acts of violence. Kind of like Erdem, cutting his pin-sharp little dresses from a turbulent mass of floral print, scattering colored stones across dresses or stringing them around necklines—and making chartreuse and fuchsia his main color accents.It will be interesting to see how many of Erdem's followers engage in this collection's dialogue between latex and lace. "I want to make my customer feel strong," he said post-show, even if the route he'd chosen was decidedly eccentric, in keeping with Peggy Guggenheim, the cultural doyenne whose style was on the designer's mind when he was working on Fall. Well, the art world hasn't let him down yet.
19 February 2012
Erdem Moralioglu uses words likepolitenessandcontrolto define his design signature, but the rhythm of his collections also points to an obvious, almost violent call and response. Where Spring was all cool, controlled blue, Erdem's new pre-collection was distinguished by volcanic splashes of orange. True, the signature politeness was there in a pleated, strapless dress with a boned bodice—its ideal accessories a dry martini and a little light jazz on the hi-fi—or the black lace twinset, or the dress that masterfully matched a high-waisted pencil skirt to a draped, three-quarter sleeve blouse (that combination of structure and drape is a new fascination for the designer). But tucked away on Erdem's mood board were some small photos of Jeanne Moreau, the French actress whose combination of twinsetted bourgeois decorum and knife-in-the-back wantonness electrified uptight audiences back in the days of black-and-white. Those images were a more meaningful signpost to the essence of the collection.The colors really told the tale. That orange was fused with yellow in a hectic floral that looked like agitated lava on the background of a black crepe skirt. It reappeared as a lurid lace appliquéd across a dress in tobacco-shaded wool. Equally outré was the combination of chartreuse and royal blue, as a silk cardigan over a dress, or as lace of one color appliquéd on a dress of the other. Imagine either of those outfits as a same-y symphony of tone-on-tone and it was easy to see how the politeness would veer into dull propriety. But Erdem has triumphed over the fine line yet again with his instinct for the rightness of wrong. It's even started to look commercial on its own terms—again, it didn't take much to visualize the mass appeal of a tobacco-toned trench in waxed cotton with a smattering of black lace overlay. It also helped that the designer confidently steered his cocktail dressiness—another longtime signature—toward a more casual daytime attitude. All in all, a stimulating appetizer for Fall.
19 December 2011
After the fire of his Fall collection, Erdem Moralioglu opted for a cool blue Spring. With the music fromIn the Mood for Loveas his soundtrack, he wanted to evoke a dreamy mood, a reverie with an underlying thrum of eroticism much more subtle than his previous outing. So he imagined a young girl, perhaps the stepdaughter of last season's woman scorned, trying on adult clothes (her mother's off-the-shoulder sheath, her father's white shirt), just edging into self-awareness. This interplay between innocence and experience produced an outfit as sweet as a camisole and shorts, as worldly as a fitted knit ensemble, and as drop-dead gorgeous as a pleated floral skirt that glinted with a second skin of paillettes. And Moralioglu couldn't have found a better physical embodiment of his concept than Anais Pouliot, the model who opened and closed the show.The actual reference he cited was Françoise Sagan's melancholicBonjour Tristesse(the little boater in the show just the sort of hat you'd imagine 17-year-old Cécile sporting in the novel). Typical of Moralioglu, that instantly added an ambiguous twist to the story he was telling with his clothes. Sagan's heroine may have been young, but she was also complicit in a grown-up tragedy. "Seen and unseen" were the designer's words to acknowledge clothes that, for all their seeming decorum, were "more undressed, more décolleté, more skin, nape, and spine" than ever before. Maximum use of Sophie Hallette's lace meant that dresses had the revealing lightness of lingerie. It reached its fullest flowering with sheer lace evening dresses lined in nude organza.Speaking of flowers—the designer's signature—he'd given tropical exotica and banal old wallpaper patterns (the second time today they provided inspiration for a collection) a "Wedgwood preciousness" by rendering them in a blue similar to the shade of the salon in which he showed in the Savoy hotel. Moralioglu's instinct for the precious is undeniably one of his greatest assets as a designer. Another is his supreme sense of control. What Fall showed is that he can subvert both those qualities to great effect while staying true to himself. Today's show was beautiful—as precious and precise as his finest work—but there was a lingering niggle that Erdem's blue Spring was possibly a littletoocool. With his backstory, he'd set the fuse to a powder keg. Perhaps there'll be another explosion next season.
18 September 2011
The mood board for Erdem's Resort collection featured photos of Tippi Hedren and Eva Marie Saint, but they were outnumbered by images of the Viennese actress Romy Schneider. "This is my brunette collection," the designer said with a laugh. "Visconti trumps Hitchcock." If by that statement he meant to convey a knowing European worldliness, then the choice of Guinevere Van Seenus—blonde though she is—as the model for his lookbook made perfect sense. Now a woman in her mid-thirties, she could pass for a contemporary re-edition of Schneider's own style. "Eerily composed" is the way Erdem put it.That same quality describes his own work. Never one with a flair for the casual, his signature look is as coolly put together as a classic cocktail dress. But Erdem has always managed to inject a hint of the unhinged as well, in the color and fabric combinations or the intensity of his prints. That came to such a head in his spectacular Fall collection that there was inevitably more restraint with his new outing. There was, for instance, complete control in the knee-length dresses, some with full slips or with decorously covered belts emphasizing the waist (the standout in a tomato red cotton jacquard with a keyhole back). The same could be said of the stretch neoprene pants with their overlay of navy lace, matched to a trim, tiny-buttoned blouson with a lace yoke. On the other hand, the quality that Erdem calls his "not-rightness" was strikingly embodied by a trench with a top half in a subtly ragged houndstooth that dissolved at the waist into rubberized, stone-colored cotton. "Literally transitional to match the season," said the designer.He used the houndstooth in a shift backed in a light silk crepe with a neoprene feel. It was the simplest expression of Erdem's heightened emphasis on the body, which ran all the way to a bustier dress in a glazed stretch cotton lined in girdle fabric. Hard to believe there was a time when all that was missing from an Erdem collection was sex. No longer. A muted eroticism is now one of his calling cards. The draped back revealing the nape of the spine, the scarf points hanging languidly off a floral sheath, the cherry lace infecting a navy gown, also in lace—all these were symptoms of the subtle heat that pulsed at the heart of the collection. They made it easy to see why this designer has won so many other hearts. "Eerily composed" his work may be, but there's devilry in his decorum.
30 May 2011
If you were ever to pick a quarrel with Erdem Moralioglu's undeniably gorgeous designs, it would probably be in relation to the issue of over-preciousness. Well, no more. Erdem cut loose today with a scenario where passion unhinged propriety. The effect of this show was akin to that of watching Natalie Portman implode inBlack Swan. But, reading between the designer's lines all these seasons, perhaps this was the collection he's always been threatening to make.His muse was an artist's wife who flies off the handle, tears apart her partner's canvases, and remakes them as pieces of clothing. With her darkened eyes and disheveled hair, she had a wanton quality that the clothes picked up and ran with. It wasn't just a case of plunging necklines or side slits, it was also the weird fabrics, dissolving tweeds, random patches of sequins, and fabulously collaged colors, like something from Pollock or Twombly (a pair of artists, incidentally, with wives who were a big part of their stories). The dark palette and impressionistic prints also suggested Monet'sWater Liliesby moonlight, and even when they flared into flagrant reds and oranges they were still morbidly beautiful, because they were the colors of a crack-up. Erdem's dresses were cut as close as a fifties floozy's sheath, and, seeing as how that particular celluloid archetype was always aching to bust out, his absolute control of his silhouette perversely helped to enrich his theme.Rest easy, Erdemites, he hasn't totally turned his back on the delicacy that is his signature. But a lace overlay looked less fragile when it was bonded to purple satin. And those famous florals? Impurestfleurs du mal.
20 February 2011
"People think floral is my trademark—even though some of my shows didn't have a flower in sight,"ErdemMoralioglu said at a presentation of his first-ever pre-fall collection in London. To prove his point, out came a dress in a "firecracker" print inspired by English skies on Guy Fawkes Day (the U.K.'s answer to the Fourth of July), and, even more notably, a tailored jacket. The emphasis was on functionality. In addition to the pretty knee-length frocks Michelle Obama, among others, knows and loves him for, there were palazzo pants, an A-line mini, to-the-floor skirts, a motorcycle jacket, and easy, sleeveless shells in the mix.But he didn't neglect the red carpet. Case in point: a draped, crepe silk maxi dress with lace details and a trompe l'oeil effect at the nape that gave the illusion that it was partially unzipped—a fitting choice, potentially, for Carey Mulligan, who wore Erdem to the Dubai Film Festival the previous night. "I feel we have transitioned from girl to woman in this collection," Moralioglu said. With that very grown-up shot of sexiness, we tend to agree.
12 December 2010
Erdem Moralioglu had a dream summer at the side of Jane Pritchard while she was co-curating the Victoria & Albert Museum'sDiaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929exhibition, which opens this week. He got to indulge his nosiness: unraveling, turning everything inside out, touching—gasp!—stuff that had actually been worn by Nijinsky himself. What stayed with Moralioglu was a vision of the costumes on their racks, carefully covered with calico, "like ghosts," the designer said.The experience was so inspiring that it shaped the substance of his Spring collection (and the sound of his show—the music was from the balletPetrouchka, one of Nijinsky's triumphs). The structure and flou of ballet costumes were clearly reflected in Moralioglu's dresses, with their fitted bodices and flaring skirts. A harlequin pattern the designer found on the racks shaped the patchwork of a shirtdress and pants, the latter paired with a blouse in an utterly ravishing poppy print, also Russian. And Nicholas Kirkwood's gorgeous shoes tied up the calf like ballet slippers.Russes aside, the delicacy and detail of the clothes were purest Erdem, and liable to send his ever-growing global fan base into transports of desire. One of the simpler examples was also the most mesmerizing: a white lace dress, appliquéd with more white lace, over-embroidered in red to create a veiled vision of loveliness—it managed to blend the designer's affection for the "off" (the red flowers had a bloodlike vividness against the white lace) with the ghostly presence of a calico-covered costume. As well as his signature over-embroidery, Moralioglu scattered Swarovski crystals across the harlequin diamonds of a sundress. The subtle glitter added another facet to the often startling prettiness of his clothes. New this season for Erdem was an undertow of sex appeal. The final floral-printed gown, with its thigh-high slit and floating train, had a summery sensuality that ought to make it a red-carpet cert.
19 September 2010
Aiming squarely at America, his biggest market, Erdem Moralioglu made versatility the heart of his resort collection. He imagined his outfits broken down and recombined to create "a beautiful, logical uniform." Winningly straightforward drop-waisted shifts, sleeveless poplin tops, and shirtdresses were center stage. They reminded the designer of the sixties (Samantha Stevens in her subdivision, perhaps), but he gave them an edge with murky, ominous prints that abstracted and combined flowers and static electricity. "Gothic suburban?" he offered with a dry laugh.Moralioglu also wanted to emphasize seasonlessness and "occasionlessness." He saw everything—even the little summer shorts—making an easy transition from a lunch date to a night at the opera. As for his newly introduced overcoats, one style in black lace and another lavishly embroidered version (he called it Klimt) would elevate any outfit. But they also underscored that, versatility or not, there's always a sumptuously detailed precision to Moralioglu's proposals. That shirtdress, for instance, was hand-embroidered at cuff and bodice. A cotton lace tee had organza cuffs, a silk print shirt was over-embroidered with flowers, and a cocktail dress in royal blue silk twill came laboriously hand-worked with tiny packets of black beads. All were reminders that the Erdem woman is a rara avis, like a Hitchcock blonde. (Grace Kelly in Erdem? You know it makes sense.) His talent is to add real, sensual life to the idea, the truest testament to which might be the way the clothes take on so much dimension once they're fitted on a woman's body.
14 June 2010
Erdem Moralioglu's twin sister, Sara, makes TV documentaries about geography and natural history. He's been looking at her films, watching the survival movieAlive, and thinking, he said, "aboutPicnic at Hanging Rock: girls surviving on the mountain. Elegantly, sort of." Moralioglu quotes these sorts of sources with a wry smile, in the full knowledge that they're pure fashion whimsy. In practical terms, what it meant was he'd come up with an autumnal palette of brown, ocher, teal, rust, and tan for his prints and coats, and a gray as dirty as a leaden November sky for a lace dress.The thing about being a designer of pretty dresses is that it takes something a little odd to keep it young and just left of conventional. Sometimes, with Erdem, it's an overload of sweetness, embroidery, and froth that does it. In this case, it was the color, slightly off and more somber than usual. Though most of the shapes—Moralioglu's familiar short, stiffly belled skirts and high-necked long gowns—stayed the same, the effects worked well here and there. A cloudy gray tulle dress with bird appliqués and a yellow silk number, its puffed sleeves vertically patterned with autumn leaves, had the kind of slightly weird aura that would turn heads at a cocktail party; and all the long finale dresses had Moralioglu's signature delicate romance about them. Otherwise, with an eye to the fact that this was an outdoorsy collection, he added a few coats to keep his girls warm in the woods. A neat camel trench with a shearling-lined hood had members of the audience planning personal orders as they struggled out into the rain-swept London streets.
21 February 2010
Looking at almost any piece in Erdem Moralioglu's Spring/Summer collection is to be drawn into a world of surreally intense color and decoration. Take his opening dress: a flower garden of minute overlapping 3-D embroidered violet and yellow pansies on a bed of green. Or a china-blue taffeta puff-sleeved, bell-skirted dress overlaid with scattered fragments of black French lace. Or a pair of matching silk shorts and a "samurai" T-shirt with tablike pie frill at the neck and shoulder, covered with another multicolored pansy print on a lime background."I really didn't want anything blurred this season," Moralioglu said. "I wanted it to have a surreal focus." He attributed some of the feeling to the visual jolt he felt at being immersed in Japanese art and culture on a trip to Kyoto and Miyajima island this summer. Mostly, he traces the mood of his show to looking at twenties illustrations ofmodan garus(a Japanese phonetic translation of "modern girls"), who rejected the kimono and started wearing Western dress. "Although," he shrugged, "I never really do theme. I always think it should just be like reading the next chapter of the same book."Moralioglu's shoes, a fusion of Mary Janes and geisha wedges, also smothered in printed flowery fabric, ended up being the only overt clue to the designer's Asian sources, not that it mattered very much. The main point is that he is moving forward, at the right speed. He's not leaving his signatures behind (like the lace-covered mackintosh trench) but adding simpler items, like the silk T-shirts, while becoming ever more recognizably exceptional.
21 September 2009
After embracing his inner Christian Lacroix on the runway in February, Erdem Moralioglu focused on ease for his charming Resort collection. There were zip-up-and-go cocktail dresses with neat ballet necklines, an evening gown that slips over the head like a T-shirt with a blouson in back, and print tops that he called "sloppy" (they looked pretty smart to us). "I was thinking about what I've done that I love," the designer said of his approach to the season. That means his abstracted florals and embroideries are back, but intriguingly filtered through a sort of Japonisme that hints at his upcoming travel schedule: He's going on holiday to Tokyo and Kyoto.
10 May 2009
Intense focus on individual creativity and quality of execution are the driving forces behind this season's London shows. They've propelled Erdem Moralioglu into a place where he could almost be called the Christian Lacroix of London: a super-decorator and colorist who commands print and embroideries in ways that surpass expectations—especially those of someone who is based in the East End. For Fall, Moralioglu's silhouettes were mostly variations on a theme: a short, doll-like, Empire line with a puffed-up skirt. It was a step away from his waftily romantic Summer collection: "I thought, She's not running free and romantic in the meadows this season," he said. "Now she's visited nightclubs and gone home on the bus." Still, it was hard to see followers of Erdem being less than entranced with the surface details—cutout black lace applied dramatically to red duchesse satin, and stylized red, purple, and black chrysanthemums or tiny yellow violas embroidered by a fellow Royal College of Art alumnus who lives in Brighton and happens to have something approaching the interpretive techniques of Lesage. If all this sounds grandiose and pretentious, the saving grace was that it was all designed within the sphere of a young girl's mentality. Toward the end, though, there was a passage of long, slim dresses with long sleeves strong enough to make several grown-up women in the audience take notice.
22 February 2009
"I just wanted something soft and hyper-romantic, easy but a bit surreal at the same time," said Erdem Moralioglu backstage. "I've got all these images of seventies theater productions ofA Midsummer Night's Dream, and Eton boys wearing flowers in their boaters."Whatever inspired him to push for all-out prettiness, and design a stunning lineup of dresses in French lace and dappled pastel-tinted watercolors of anemones and irises, it's clear things are working more brilliantly for Erdem every season. Take a tiered ice-blue lace Edwardiana dress with an orange ribbon clashingly threaded through it, or a sugar-pink high-necked organdy number with a 3-D smothering of "a hundred hydrangea petals in the bodice." The clothes, which also included a delicately washed-out pale blue ghost of toile de Jouy and almost sculptural zones of richly encrusted jeweled and frilled embroideries on sleeves and in deep hemlines, were breathtaking in movement. They made for a spellbinding show by an exceptional talent whose self-taught standards of workmanship almost put his creations on an equal footing with some of the things seen in haute couture.
17 September 2008
"I went to town this season," said Erdem Moralioglu backstage after his show. "From the beginning, I decided to just go all the way with what I love." Throwing off mental and even commercial constraints is a brave thing to do in a darkening economic moment, but the intense flare-up of color, embroidery, and bejeweling this designer laid on may be the very thing that confirms his future.Why so? For the first time, he marshaled a collection that was completely together, stamped with distinct and confident personality—a love of whimsy in a young but couture-ish idiom—and underpinned by attentively serviced sponsorship deals. He'd talked Taroni silks into providing lushly colored lengths of double duchesse, and he'd worked on lime, purple, acid yellow, and orange prints that "looked blurry, like a landscape speeding past when you're on a train." The fabrics turned into short dresses with dance skirts, covered-up cocktail suits with flat bows detailing stand-up necklines and belts, and dramatic strapless gowns—pieces made all the more outstanding with over-embroidery and padding (hand-done by Jenny King, a friend in Brighton), and scattered chunks of asymmetric gumdrop-colored Swarovski crystals.Worked in, too, was cream lace from the French manufacturer Sophie Halette (a long-standing relationship) and raincoats representing Erdem's continuing consultancy with Mackintosh (trenchcoatswithlace in two cases). It made for a dramatic show of integrated ideas that left the audience with the memorable final image of a funnel-collared gown, smothered with jeweled embroidery in the bodice, dropping to the floor in a gorgeous length of purple moiré silk. Bravo.
13 February 2008
Erdem Moralioglu invoked Saint Laurent's "wrong-rightness" to add some spine to his fourth collection. "I wanted to put things together that didn't go together," he said after a show that climaxed in a mash-up of biker jacket and bridal gown. YSL's contrary spirit also ruled in a color scheme that saw red, pink, and gray stripes defining body-limning little dresses. The master, having once scandalously proposed a raincoat as the suitable accompaniment for an evening dress at Glyndebourne, might even recognize a kindred spirit in Erdem, with his bubble-backed mac in the same shade used for fishermen's sou'westers. (An ongoing collaboration with Mackintosh once again yielded some of the strongest pieces on this runway.)Of course, it's really much too premature to weight Erdem's budding trajectory with such analogies. His own focus was on his fabrics—the taffetas, silks, and weaves were all custom-made for him. The fan-pleating that fell away from a tiny "biker jacket" bodice or cascaded down the back of a trapeze dress was his way of "allowing the fabric to do what it wants to do." These swinging shapes were better ambassadors for the designer than some of the more fitted pieces or the harem pant silhouette (here, Erdem turned Eden, as in Barbara).If the Mackintoshes were a winning holdover from seasons past, so were the prints, botanicals blown up and smudged on the computer until they looked familiar-yet-not. A full print dress fanning out from the tight little apex of a halter nudged the Erdem ethos up a notch in sophistication. At the same time, it highlighted the fact that Erdem's work, like that of many of his London peers, thrives in its own slightly surreal little bubble.
17 September 2007
There was something in Erdem Moralioglu's program notes about Dumas'La Dame aux Caméliasmeeting Derek Jarman'sJubilee. Ignore it. Erdem enthusiasts should instead rush straight to the end of his collection. There, they'll find the cream of what he does, and it is, indeed, creamy: pretty concoctions whipped up in French lace and flowy fan-pleated tiers that somehow manage not to come over as sickly sweet.These, along with billowy-sleeved poet blouses and long drop-waisted dresses, have emerged over four seasons as Erdem's signatures—and the more richly he lays on the effects, the better they look. In a conscious bid to add variety (and some pieces whose price tags might not make buyers blanch), he's also working with Mackintosh, the original British rainwear manufacturer, to bring interesting cuts to raincoats. Where he goes wrong is when he skimps. His opening dresses in his signature insect prints were spoiled by being too short and too tight—or maybe that was the punk influence. Either way, they were a mistake, because the wispy Erdem couldn't muster a punk gesture if his life depended on it. He should stay with romance, and push it as far as he can.
11 February 2007
The adjectives being thrown around after Erdem Moralioglu's show—pretty! gorgeous! lovely!—haven't been heard much at the London shows. There's been plenty of buzz about the nineties trend, of course, but there's always room for a well-done, individualistic something else. Erdem provided just that with a collection that he said, "was about Perry Ellis and early-American sportswear, combined with something decadent and eighteenth century, like lace and tapestry."In his third season since winning the Fashion Fringe competition, he worked at refining the ideas with which he began: dresses, pleating, and a taste for odd botanical and ornithological prints. Encouraged by the fact that his most expensive things have sold best, and counseled by his twin sister, Sara—"My best critic!"—he came up with a great blend of highly wrought laces and encrusted embroideries, smartly contrasted with cleaner, sportier elements, like raincoats cut from traditional Mackintosh fabric, that kept the mood from becoming too sweet.Some of the pieces, like a trapeze dress made from panels of rose-patterned lace and cream satin pleats flowing from a heavily embroidered yoke, are beautiful one-offs. Many were executed using deluxe French lace donated by Sophie Hallette in a sponsorship deal, and made by people who used to manufacture for Roland Mouret. "I lucked out this season," he declared after the show. "I felt much more comfortable with this collection, like I found my feet."
21 September 2006
Erdem Moralioglu is the half-Turkish, half-English, Canada-raised designer who won last year's British Fashion Fringe competition. As if that isn't complicated enough to remember, focus on the fact that after graduating from London's Royal College of Art, he worked for Diane von Furstenberg.DVF, or at least her example, is what Moralioglu should be focusing on, too. His competition collection won on the strength of its soft printed dresses—not, in this case, wraps, but long, accordion-pleated floor-sweepers. That whimsical, romantic bent comes, he says, from a childhood spent watching Merchant Ivory films on PBS; and if he's going to make a mark, it will be as a dressmaker. Unfortunately, he obscured that underlying potential in his debut show by trying too hard to prove he can do tailoring, and by overworking a dandyish George Sand-meets-Napoleon theme. If he stops fretting about historical narrative and gives in to his soft side—the one that came up with a pretty cream silk dress and a striped floor-length gown with an antique lace ruff—it'll be easier to clarify what he has to offer.
13 February 2006