One of these days, Erdem Moralioglu really ought to costume a historical movie. This season is a sort of pre-fall trailer for the season to come; a staging-post between his exquisite, veiled, museum conservation-inspired show for spring, and the ideas he’s rehearsing for his upcoming fall runway. “It’s about bringing this Victorian world to life.”
It’s not that Erdem’s collections are ever front-on costumey. They’re made for the social whirl of modern events, balanced out with his more practical daywear takes on tailoring, trousers, and suchlike. Nadine Ijewere was photographing his notes on a theme—puffed-sleeved dresses, varieties of long-skirted silhouettes, cropped bustiers, elaborate-but-light textures and embroideries, and more sober coats—while he talked through the backstory that lies behind them.
This chapter’s colors, prints, silhouettes, and suggestions of under-things are shadow-projections of his research in the London Library in St James’s Square. “I’m there every Tuesday. I mean, you can read books that Virginia Woolf used to borrow!” Erdem’s recent studies have immersed him in the wallpapers and upholsteries of Victorian houses, and the crinolined fashions worn by the women who lived in them. “I’ve been looking at this time, around the 1860s, when the Industrial Revolution was happening. When there were new dyes—this arsenic green became possible and cyanotype photography.”
A flounced, dark green ball skirt, a Watteau-back dress, broderie anglaise petticoat dresses, and 3-D anemone appliqués came out of his hours of study, while narrow, pleated, flower-sprigged dresses harked more towards children’s book illustrations by Kate Greenaway.
Every season, his narratives sound more like the pages of an evolving script. Are there definite characters beginning to emerge from these pre-fall sketches? There usually are, by the time Erdem gets to mount his runway shows. We’ll see when his next act takes the stage in London Fashion Week in February.
