“Happy House,” the punk hit by Siouxsie and the Banshees, played out the finale of Erdem’s 20th-anniversary show. It was a fitting anthem (putting aside the singer’s plaintive tone for a second) for a London celebration of the independent designer. Erdem Moralioglu has indeed spent the last two decades building a house on making women all over the world feel happy with his resolute belief in his brand of romantic optimism.
Moralioglu didn’t want it to feel like a retrospective, he said, once his rich parade of collaged brocades and satins, diamanté brooches, ribbons, lace and feathers had walked through a gallery at Tate Britain. “It’s a mash-up,” he added. “An imaginary dialogue between everyone who’s inspired me over the years.” By “ everyone” he meant all the historical characters he’s researched in the London Library, Chatsworth House, Windsor Castle, the National Portrait Gallery, Bloomsbury, Kew Gardens, records of queer Victorian and Edwardian society, La Scala Milan and beyond.
The frayed-edge inside out floral quilting of the opera coat Barbours was the upshot of Moralioglu’s imaginary encounter with the late Debo, Duchess of Devonshire at Chatsworth that’s become a permanent house collaboration. The luscious watermelon lace pannier dress was a nod to a photo of Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge, the lover of the legendary lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall. Moralioglu made references to the late Elizabeth II and the 1950s ballgowns and beribboned regalia she wore as a young woman; the veiled tailoring a memory of encountering the archives of the V&A. The flowing cream lace nightgown dress, now with crini hoops creating a floating volume in its skirts were a memory of his fantasy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as far back as his spring 2009 breakthrough collection.
And so on, but not so literally that you needed a degree in Erdem-ology to appreciate it. “I wanted a looseness about it,” he explained in his backstage post-show press debrief. Sure enough: there was a chopped-up vintage bricolage air to a lot of it. Some of it was down to his upcycling of textile and embroidery swatches, for example the lovely lemon satin and sparkly fern-covered pencil dress.
Moralioglu was just getting onto the origin of the jeans and hacked-off halternecks (his graduate collection from the Royal College of Art) when he was interrupted mid-flow by a visit from Glenn Close and Helen Mirren, closely followed by Ruth Wilson. They’d been applauding from the benches, alongside Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw and Russell Tovey. His closest designer friends from the early London mid-aughts were cheering him on too. The delighted faces of Christopher and Tammy Kane, Roksanda Ilincic and Moralioglu’s architect husband Philip Joseph are caught in the background of Vogue Runway’s pictures. A happy house, indeed.