“Can you imagine, 10 years, and here I am in Mayfair?” Yes, Erdem Moralioglu is 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.
