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 myself, 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 it extraordinary: 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,” he said during an appointment in London, pristinely clad in a delicate dusty blue rollneck from his first-ever men’s collection. “She always wore these very controlled, nipped-in silhouettes, but her universe is very chaotic. I’m fascinated by someone whose universe is chaotic when they, themselves, are extraordinarily controlled.”
Moralioglu translated what he called the “nipped-in propriety” of Agar’s own 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 habotai 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.
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