Erdem Moralıoğlu toned down the aristocratic glamour this season, delivering a collection that felt more nonchalant and decadent than posh and overdone. His inspiration was Hélène Smith, a late-19th-century French psychic and artist who claimed to experience visions of belonging to Marie Antoinette’s court. Somehow, all of that translated seamlessly into Erdem’s collection: high-neck lace dresses were slashed into liberating mini lengths; exquisitely embroidered and embellished coats carried a cool, airy volume that suggested an artist’s wardrobe; and unexpected splashes of neon – new territory for Erdem – sent eveningwear and sheer robes into a psychedelic register reminiscent of Dries Van Noten. With this latest work, it seems Erdem is carving out a new method for navigating his once overly-regal universe.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Hey, did you know about my newsletter – Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
This season, Erdem delivered one of his best collections… ever. It’s just felt breathtakingly beautiful without being frou-frou. There was an aristocratic, yet romantically decaying quality about it. And between the lines, a meaningful context that didn’t make the spring-summer 2025 collection feel heavy with history as it often happens with Erdem Moralioglu’s work. The title page of Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” was 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.” Una, Lady Troubridge, who mostly wore pretty dresses, was reflected in the flapper-ish eveningwear bedazzling with chandelier crystals and fragile cotton. Trouser suits were an ode to Radclyffe. The collection resonated with the audience, and marked another great moment of this London Fashion Week.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Hey, did you know about my newsletter – Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
Erdem Moralıoğlu is at his best when he leaves behind his comfort zone of florals and regality. In the halls of the British Museum, amidst the ancient grandeur of the Parthenon Marbles, a modern muse was reborn through imagination of the designer. As the autumn-winter 2024 fashion show progressed, a vivid homage to the American-Greek soprano Maria Callas and her iconic debut as Medea at La Scala in Milan unfolded. From the pea-green opera coat with its extravagantly exaggerated collar at the start 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, this certainly was an exuberant Erdem moment. In between we had the designer’s extended tribute to Callas, her greatness, her status, and style “almost as a pop idol of the ’50s,” as he put it. 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’ wardrobe – the tiny-waisted, full-skirted dresses; draped scarf necklines; swing coats – were in full force. 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 were yet another hints we are looking at a modern-day interpretation of a legend’s wardrobe.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Hey, did you know about my newsletter – Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
The Erdem spring-summer 2024 show at the British Museum was one of the best in seasons coming from the designer. The collection was dedicated to the late Duchess of Devonshire, Deborah “Debo” Cavendish, a very stylish dame. A friend of the family, Erdem Moralioglu had been given access to the archives of Chatsworth House – the family seat in Derbyshire – and trusted with the task of giving Debo’s antique furnishing textiles new life in the form of clothes. “When curtains came down in Chatsworth, they were often turned into upholstery. She believed in the continuity of using them,” he explained. And so, Moralioglu presented his very extra take on upcycling. The show opened with a series of coats created from Debo’s (actual) old textiles and spliced – via a collaboration with Barbour – with the waxed cotton jackets she wore in the park at Chatsworth. “I loved taking the idea of the 1940s’s opera coat and these big couture volumes but making a piece of outerwear. She loved quilted skirts, and we pieced them together using antique fabrics from Chatsworth,” Moralioglu explained. The look had all the soulfulness of lived-in clothes, invigorated by wild cutting as if he’d audaciously hacked through the antique cloth to release all its history. It transpired in the fabrics that followed, each imbued with the feeling of Chatsworth’s interiors and one more intricately woven than the other.
The youngest of the five Mitford sisters, Debo wasn’t just the queen of the social scene in the 1930s but an accomplished writer who cared deeply about the documentation and preservation of Chatsworth House and all its splendours. On the show’s soundtrack, she could be heard explaining how terribly privileged she knew she was to live there. Her soundbites were mixed with fragments of Always on My Mind. A layered character, Debo was also a passionate Elvis Presley fan and collector of memorabilia. “The more I found out about her, the more I fell in love with her,” Moralioglu said after the show, and you could see why. For all its historical significance and mind-blowing sense of resourcefulness, there was a lot of humour to the Erdem collection as well. Debo’s love of Presley was interpreted in starburst embroideries and garments with whispers of rhinestone cowboys, and her passion for chicken breeding was celebrated in plumage-like textures and in the magnified bows of kitten heels that made the models walk with the bobbing of a feathered-footed chicken. It was an inspired, emotional and quite spectacular show, which only begged one question: How will Moralioglu manufacture a collection created from antique textiles? “We need to figure it out! No, there’s a plan… I think,” he smiled. “I hope.”
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram! By the way, did you know that I’ve started a newsletter called Ed’s Dispatch? Click here to subscribe!
Erdem‘s spring-summer 2023 collection captured an important moment in time. The last moments of the 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. 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. Looking at history and being a museum, gallery, and library geek is totally Erdem Moralioglu’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. But then again, as his work – and the existence of all the British museums proves – the momentous significance of the past is never gone.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
Design & Culture by Ed 