“She was an anti-fascist who fought against racism...a journalist, poet, muse; completely ahead of her time.” Erdem Moralioglu is speaking about Nancy Cunard, the heiress to the cruise line, whose portrait he came across with Robin Muir at the “Cecil Beaton: Bright Young Things” exhibition, now hanging locked in at London’s National Portrait Gallery. After being thrown on the violent switchback of time and events, this pre-fall collection has now landed with unforeseeable prescience in the summer of 2020. “It’s so weird” Moralioglu said, “because I designed it last winter.” Weird, because long before the pandemic and the last week’s explosion of outrage against racism, these lovely, delicate, floral clothes—Watteau-backed here, flounced there—were inspired by a woman who chose to use her immense white privilege and wealth to oppose the rise of fascism and support the work of black artists and writers.
Well, Moralioglu has a record for submerging complex, rebel women and subversively timely histories amongst his fil-coupés, airy organzas, and rose prints. In fall 2017, at the outbreak of the migrant crisis in Europe, he reminded people of his half-Turkish heritage; last summer he spoke about the artist and communist activist Tina Modotti. Whatever drew him to Cunard, via Beaton, might have been what the photographer saw: her strong, wraithlike style, her turbans and bangles, her graphic-visual originality. Really, beyond the echo of a few jeweled aviator bonnets here, you wouldn’t connect the dots back to Cunard.
But they’re worth following, especially in the context of what happened after 1928, when she—a socialite in Surrealist intellectual circles—met the African American jazz pianist Henry Crowder. “Henry made me,” she once wrote. Crowder instructed Cunard about American racism, introduced her to Harlem, and assisted her publishing house, The Hours Press. Cunard’s epic survey of black culture, Negro Anthology (1934) with contributions from Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston has been recognized by Brent Hayes Edwards, the Columbia University professor of English, as being an early proponent of the understanding of black transnationalism.
In the conclusion of Erdem’s press release, Cunard’s influence becomes a generalized characterization of a muse, a projection, perhaps, onto the kind of women who will buy his clothes. “Until recently, her nobility defined her identity; now she is defined by her principles, not just her privilege.” In a time such as this, that reads more pointedly than ever.
