Designer Erdem Moralioglu’s AW25 collection has a very specific backstory. While in Dublin, he discusses the past, present and future of his namesake label …
“I am a uniform dresser,” designer Erdem Moralioglu, MBE, tells THE GLOSS on a sunny afternoon over coffee. “Quite casual. I generally wear a wool crew neck [sweater], Levi’s and New Balance old-man running shoes, my true uniform.” They may be creative masterminds, but it seems that nearly all fashion designers have their go-to uniforms, just like the rest of us. Erdem is modest, curious and totally charming, with impeccable manners. As we talk, we are surrounded by pieces from his AW25 collection, which have just been previewed by a select group of clients over an intimate lunch at Brown Thomas.
Born in Montreal to a Turkish father and a British mother, Erdem (known only by his first name) is the award-winning creative director and founder of his eponymous London fashion label. Over the past 20 years, Erdem, who turns 47 later this year, has built a fashion house known for exquisite fabrics, signature vibrant prints and intricate embellishment. Erdem’s clothes – romantic, flattering, cool yet classic clothes that women of all ages want to wear – are wearable works of art, pieces to be kept and treasured forever. He has dressed some of the world’s most stylish women, including Alexa Chung, Keira Knightley, Rosamund Pike, and Anna Wintour. Since making his London Fashion Week debut in 2005, he has become a fashion powerhouse with collections sold all over the world. Bloomsbury in London remains his base, where he lives in a beautiful townhouse with his architect husband Philip Joseph.
“Kaye paints these extraordinary, very evocative portraits … ”
Erdem’s AW25 collection was his first ever artist collaboration with friend Kaye Donachie who graduated from the Royal College of Art in London a few years ahead of him. “Kaye paints these extraordinary, very evocative portraits, mostly of women, loosely based on fictional characters,” he tells me. Kaye is particularly fascinated by figures like English writer Virginia Woolf and poet and artist’s muse Iris Tree. “She does a lot of historical research, gathering imagery, and then puts it through a kind of internal filter to recreate something entirely from her imagination. She refers to them as ‘abstract portraits’, because in her mind, they’re abstractions of a certain reality, they’re made-up figures.” After buying one of Kaye’s paintings many years ago, Erdem commissioned the artist to paint a portrait of his late mother. “I commissioned a really large painting for the store on South Audley Street. I loved the idea of my mother, who had helped make it all happen, being able to see the store. Whether or not customers know who she is, I love the idea that she is there.”
Kaye’s approach resonated with Erdem’s own process. “I always had it in the back of my mind that Kaye would be an amazing person to collaborate with. I too tend to work through narratives and stories, usually centered around people from the past, figures I can abstract in some way. For example, I once did a collection based on Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, two men who lived as sisters Stella and Fanny, and who were arrested. Or Marian North, an English Victorian biologist, and Radclyffe Hall, the English poet and author, best known for her novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature,” he explains. “Kaye was so generous with her art. We took a pattern piece and Kaye filled it in with a portrait; just to see what happened, taking something that she would normally apply to canvas and adapting it. We took banal wallpaperlike prints and Kaye painted over them and applied them to very structured garments, and the result was so interesting.”
“You strive for something very permanent.”
Standout AW25 pieces include dreamy organza cocktail dresses printed with Kaye’s portraits, a glistening green sequined slash-neck pencil dress, couture-like crushed satin skirts, sheath dresses printed with Kaye’s abstract floral artwork, and handpainted portraits on “limited, limited edition” Bloom handbags that Erdem finished with an Art Nouveau inspired brass flower handle. “As a designer, you strive for something very permanent and beautifully designed,” he says.
Erdem finds living in London “infinitely inspiring”. “I go to the London Library on Tuesdays, the oldest lending library in London, where a librarian helps me with research into a specific time or character or place. I really like the process of exploring an idea. Philip, who’s an architect, has introduced me to a world that I didn’t know a huge amount about. He loves the Georgian period, which is very minimalist, and the architect Luis Barragán. I find that world very interesting. London is so inspiring, it’s alive: the Tate, the V&A, the British Museum, the National Gallery, the West End, the ballet,” he adds.
Photograph featured in black and white: American actress Adele Astaire (sister of Fred Astaire) and her husband Lord Charles Cavendish at Lismore Castle, Co Waterford, where they lived until 1944. Erdem’s AW18 collection was inspired by Adele.
Who is the Erdem woman? “I think if you’d asked me that question 20 years ago, I would have given you a very precise and probably incorrect answer. The longer I do this, the more I realise she’s so many different women: she’s 22, she’s 45, she’s 73. She’s a doctor, a gallerist, an artist, she’s a mother – she’s so many different people. I feel like we’re growing up together.”
The ageless appeal of Erdem’s designs resonates with Irish clients, from stylish art collector and racehorse owner Marie Donnelly to daringly fashionable PR and fashion collector Tara O’Connor.
Our time is up. Erdem is off to the airport and back to his beloved studio. Later this month, he will show his SS26 collection in London. He smiles as he concludes: “It feels like a really exciting time.”
Erdem is available at Brown Thomas.
SEE MORE: See Inside Erdem’s Restored Georgian Home In London
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