Models wearing theatrical marabou feather-trimmed looks backstage at Erdem’s autumn 2024 show, which was held at the British Museum. Ruby Pluhar. We’re 17 days out from Erdem Moralioglu’s autumn 2024 womenswear presentation at London Fashion Week, and the designer is thinking aloud. “You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about it,” he says of being inspired by Maria Callas, the iconic ’50s-era opera singer-turned-tragic recluse, to create the collection. “I’m happy I have my coffee.”
The day is just beginning in London, where Moralioglu, who designs under the mononym Erdem, is based and speaking today via Zoom. But talk of Callas conjures visions of lands even further afield — the United States, where she was born, and Greece, the birthplace of her parents. “I love the idea of looking at some very specific performances that she did in the early ’50s,” he says, “and the relationship between her and her Greekness, and the idea of Greek mythology.”
Staged just over a fortnight later beneath the Parthenon marbles at the British Museum, the show saw models stalk the runway in pieces sung from both Erdem’s and Callas’s hymn sheets. A pea green opera coat, worn by Guinevere van Seenus, commanded attention with its oversized collar, button and brooch, while cinched waistlines, slingbacks accented with fabric rosettes or marabou feathers, and pyjama-style suiting also nodded to his 1950s “pop icon”. Punchy floral prints — an Erdem staple — honoured the flowers thrown onstage after Callas’s performances. Feathers collided with lace. Broken-crystal embellishments were strewn across sumptuously coloured cocktail dresses. The models’ hair was secured beneath wig nets and pins. Contrast and contradiction form an enduring premise for Moralioglu, and the negotiation of Callas’s person and persona permeated the designs. “I love this idea of front and centre, onstage and backstage, and the kind of inner workings of our head,” he says.
Whether overtly or subtly, the biographies of progressive or unconventional women are regular creative drawcards for Moralioglu. Erdem’s spring 2024 collection, for example, was a fabulously chintzy homage to the late Deborah “Debo” Cavendish, the youngest of the Mitford sisters, and included pieces fashioned from Cavendish’s floral curtains from the 1940s. Meanwhile, the work and grading techniques of the Viennese portrait photographer Madame d’Ora influenced the brand’s sophomore menswear release in 2022.
“There’s something interesting when you examine someone forensically and build an imaginary world around them,” Moralioglu says of his muse-driven ideation. “It’s never a literal thing, but rather they almost provide a narrative for me to populate visually. That’s how I begin the collection. And sometimes the collection has everything to do with them by the time it’s finished, and sometimes it actually almost has nothing to do with them.”
His Callas-inspired collection achieves both: it offers an expedition to the heart of a complex character, and an opportunity for Moralioglu to mine his personal history and reckon with his connection to home. Callas was born in New York to Greek parents and died in France, while her ashes were scattered off the coast of Greece. “That idea of being from somewhere, but that’s not necessarily your identity, I find very interesting,” Moralioglu says.
Born in Montreal, Canada, to a British mother and a Turkish father, Moralioglu, 46, and his twin sister, the journalist and documentary filmmaker Sara Moralioglu, grew up with an acute sense of their parents’ homesickness. “My mum was very, very English and my father was very Turkish,” he says. “And I think with that comes a kind of rootlessness.”
Moralioglu proposes that his preoccupation with history and lineage is directly linked to this rootlessness (his parents both passed away while he was in his 20s). “I’ve lived now longer in England than I have in Canada. So I’m not quite Canadian, I’m not quite English and I’m not quite Turkish,” he says. “Not in a bad way, you’re kind of just lots of different things — and that’s OK.”
His youth was spent watching a lot of Merchant Ivory films and nursing a fascination for the women in his life. “When I was a child I only ever drew women, stared at women,” he says, adding that he was transfixed by “how they moved; how they wore clothes, colour; my mum’s lipsticks; how the clothes hung in her closet. I was fascinated by the language of this beautiful, secret kind of femininity. My dad was really into hockey, so I’m sure he was like, ‘What am I going to do with this kid? He’s just drawing women with puff sleeves all day.’ ”
At school, Moralioglu studied classics before pursuing a Bachelor of Arts in fashion. He then moved to London for a work placement in the studio of the late designer Vivienne Westwood, where his inability to correctly cut a tricky piece of jersey saw him banished to the brand archives — a punishment he looks back on with glee. “It was amazing,” he says. “Storm in a Teacup, all of these amazing collections that were so important. To see how things were cut and to understand the fabrics was such a really beautiful experience.”
The internship impressed on him the benefit of a London education, and he secured a scholarship at the Royal College of Art, whose alumni include the designers Philip Treacy, Julien Macdonald and Christopher Bailey. For his 2003 graduation collection, Moralioglu presented a line that would help establish his singular perspective — eveningwear stitched in mismatched florals and prints, street market-sourced African cottons and vintage lace, and toile de Jouy from Paris.
Soon after graduating, Moralioglu landed an assistant role with the Manhattan-based designer Diane von Furstenberg. The New York stint was short-lived, and he was quickly back in London working on his own label. In 2005, the year Erdem launched, the designer was awarded first prize in the city’s annual Fashion Fringe competition for emerging designers, which included mentorship and an East London studio space. “Odds are it was the high-neck, sleeveless printed Edwardian dress, trailing a frilled lemon train, that swung it for him,” wrote the journalist Sarah Mower of his win.
Moralioglu presented his first eponymous collection for London Fashion Week’s autumn 2006 schedule, and after a shaky start that included an order shipment stolen en route to Barneys, Erdem the brand grew from strength to strength. Moralioglu picked up stockists in key global markets, famous faces donned his designs at film festivals and red-carpet events, a dedicated e-commerce platform was established in 2014, and the following year he opened the doors to Erdem’s debut flagship store in Mayfair’s South Audley Street, designed by his architect husband, Philip Joseph, to be “a space where you walk in and you understand my world, or our world”.
Critical acclaim soared in 2008, with the brand receiving the British Fashion Council’s Fashion Forward Award, and never really stopped. Moralioglu went on to collect prizes including the 2010 Vogue/British Fashion Council Designer Fashion Fund Award and the 2014 British Fashion Council’s Womenswear Designer of the Year Award. Amid the early coronavirus lockdowns of 2020, which coincided with Erdem’s 15th year in business, Moralioglu received a call from Buckingham Palace — he was being awarded an MBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list for his contribution to the British fashion industry. “It was a wonderful way to acknowledge my anniversary,” he told his friend the writer Emma Elwick-Bates of the announcement.
Today, our call is being conducted under the watchful eyes of a stern-faced woman perched behind Moralioglu’s left shoulder. “I think she’s from Germany,” he says of the framed portrait painting. “I know nothing about her. I think she’s from the 1930s, and she’s wonderful.” The designer is an avid collector — of portraits, Victorian corsetry and archival issues of L’Officiel magazine, among other fixations — and filters through his various auction alerts each morning. “My obsessions with portraiture, busts and books are in the very fabric of me,” he told T Magazine in February. “If something is beautiful, I want to have it.”
When he’s not in the studio, Moralioglu is on the hunt for more expressions of beauty, art, inspiration. “I am always keeping my eyes open,” he says, and he goes to art, ballet and theatre events as often as possible.
Creative collaborations have also become a regular fixture on the brand’s calendar.
In 2017, H&M released its Erdem collection: men’s and womenswear pieces that echoed Moralioglu’s signature design codes, accompanied by a Baz Luhrmann-directed short film. A limited-edition beauty collection with Nars, titled Strange Flowers, soon followed.
The Royal Ballet also came knocking around this time, seeking costumes for Christopher Wheeldon’s 2018 production, “Corybantic Games”. “Chris was creating this piece as it was in real time,” Moralioglu recalls. “To see those dancers, to see those movements become memorised and part of their musculature, it was the most physical, amazing thing to see.”
The costume production process coincided with a season in which Moralioglu had been researching the late Queen Elizabeth II’s early-’50s outfits. “They aligned with the same period that the piece of music was composed in, so I was looking at 1950s underpinnings and underwear,” he says. Visions of girdles and brassieres swirled around his mind, “but it wasn’t really about that”. Instead, the project became one of “stripping back”; crafting sheer pleated skirts and hems lined with black felt-tip pen-style edges. “It was very much an exercise of restraint,” he says. “It was no colour, no texture. It was about form and shape and the body, and I loved it. I loved doing it. It was hard.”
For all Moralioglu’s talk of rootlessness, Erdem is gearing up for its 20th anniversary in 2026. An independent label — “and I’m so proud of that”, he says — the brand appointed its first CEO in 2019, the former Chloé managing director Philippa Nixon, although Moralioglu remains firmly in place at the creative helm. There is a book in the pipeline and other projects he’s unable to divulge at this time (more brick-and-mortar stores, if he has his way), with exact celebration plans still to be decided. Looking back on the past 20 years fills him with a sense of pride for his team and an excitement for what the next decades might hold. “I know for the next 20 years my eyes will stay opened,” he says, noting that he would like to “remain a student, in a weird way”. He adds: “There’re so many other aspects of things that I would love to design — a full ballet or work on a film. I think it’s also really interesting to use different sides of your brain. I started taking photos a few years ago, and that’s been something that I really enjoy.” On the other hand, “If nothing were to change and I was just continuing with what I’m doing right now, it’s a dream — to just be in a position where I can express and create a collection every six months and work with everyone that I work with, whom I love.”
