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.
