“There’s something wonderfully modern about wearing a cashmere sweater to a black-tie event,” reflected Erdem Moralioglu on a screen-share from his office. Surrounded by women from another era—his newest portrait acquisitions lined up behind him—he was also demonstrating some rather cultivated digital skills. You could say that contrast summed up his collection: whimsy versus progress, the eternal duality ensconced in the mind of Moralioglu. If rioting against formal dress codes sounds like the irreverence of the new generations, he had of course found that inspiration in a much earlier front-runner. After spending lockdown reading Love in a Cold Climate, he devoted his collection to the “formal casualness” of Nancy Mitford’s own wardrobe. “Nipped but with a pleated skirt and boots,” as he said, producing a picture of the author in her country attire.
At first glance, it looked like a typical Erdem proposal: romantic fil coupe floral dresses, neat tonal floral jacquard skirtsuits, and delicately hand-embroidered evening numbers fashioned in things like hammered silk. He juxtaposed his lady-core with cameos from the humble men’s wardrobe, such as big mohair cardigans, rugged trench coats, and stomp-y gardening boots, all derived from Mitford. The collection was shot around Gunnersbury House and its damp grounds; Moralioglu even topped off the pieces with sou’westers imagined in moiré, which would hardly have passed the Balmoral Test for outdoor apparel. But underpinning this aristocratic affair were this designer’s entirely contemporary values. The pragmatic nature of a precollection, he said, made him think about “lots of different women, lots of different body types, and lots of different moments during the day.”
By inviting model Charlotte Robinson, a U.K. size 16, to pose for the look book, he continued the inclusive sizing efforts he launched with his last resort collection; he now offers a majority of his collections in sizes up to a U.K. 22. “It works as much as a size 6 works,” he said when asked about sales. “There’s a great power in being able to dress lots of different women. I would hate for someone to feel like they can’t be part of this world. When something is beautifully designed and considered, it should be able to work in different sizes. So why would you limit the sizes you offer?” He also cast Ikram Abdi Omar, a Bristol-raised Swedish model of Somali descent who wears a hijab.
His choices were possessed by the spirit of Mitford. “She marched to her own drum in a time when you had to dress in a certain way,” said Moralioglu. He had used his new print collaboration with Liberty as a form of research—“The way I would the National Portrait Gallery or the V&A”—losing himself in the years of their archives that corresponded with Mitford’s heyday. His muse would no doubt have approved of five white shirts borrowed from a men’s wardrobe, which will become part of Erdem’s permanent collection: the Romantic, the Robe, the Poet, the Tux, and the Victorian. “She was given a life she could have just lived and existed as an aristocrat. But she didn’t,” he said. “She wrote, she created a body of work. And she wrote her own rules…and broke them.”
