Beautiful young men standing in an English country garden, against beds of succulent purple and yellow flag irises. Erdem Moralioglu, with his cinematic eye for glancingly historical biographical references, almost conjured a reincarnation of an everyday scene from the country life of the painter and plantsman Cedric Morris for his summer menswear collection. It was shot at Benton End in rural Suffolk, Morris’s home from 1939, where he created a microcosm of an artistic avant-garde bohemian life with his lover Arthur Lett-Haines, as well as founding an art school. Lucian Freud was an early pupil.
As promised, Moralioglu revealed the thread of this story which connects with his resort womenswear collection. Cedric Morris, it turns out, was a friend and supplier of the society florist Constance Spry, who designed the Queen’s Coronation and who had her highly successful shop a few doors down from where the Erdem flagship is now. Connie Spry and her aristo clientele are all over his collection. There’s nothing like a romantic coincidence to get Moralioglu going. This one was a pure gift in terms of the colors he loves, inspiration for his boyishly foppish sense of style all the way through to the floppy, blowsy bow ties which seem almost like blooming corsages picked from Morris’s iris beds.
The idea for digging into this aristocratic alternative history had actually hit him a little while ago at a Cedric Morris exhibition at the Garden Museum. Even without knowing a thing about this artist, though, you can sense the spirit of the 1940s that Erdem picked up in photos and paintings: Englishmen in hand-knitted sweaters, tweeds, shorts, and silk dressing gowns. Most notably, given current menswear fashion trends, there are flowing Oxford bags in various fabrics, one of them in white needlecord with a matching blazer. Moralioglu has embroidered his own monogram on the pocket, E, with his birthdate, 1977, beneath it. It appears on the breast of a marine sweater too. A posh touch; a branch into branding; everything in Erdem’s menswear garden is springing up nicely.
