It was 23 years ago, as Erdem Moralioğlu sat cross-legged on the late Vivienne Westwood’s studio floor during an internship, that he decided to try his luck at becoming a fashion designer.
“She was just such an extraordinary, amazing woman. She and [her husband and creative partner] Andreas would let the work placement students watch fittings and watch as they draped fabric on the stand. It was a very important time for me,” he said. Five years later he staged his first show, and he has been a fixture of London fashion ever since.
“Naturally, she is very much on my mind,” said Moralioğlu, who attended Westwood’s memorial service two days before his latest show on Sunday. “I love her.”
Ghosts of Westwood seem to appear on every catwalk at a London fashion week that is dedicated to her memory. At this Erdem show, they were glimpsed in the shadows cast by corsets and bodices, by bustle skirts made saucy rather than staid – that Westwood would have approved of – by the slivers of bare skin exposed by twists and explosions of taffeta.
But Moralioğlu also had two other ghosts in mind, former occupants of the Georgian townhouse where he now lives, which 150 years ago was a “House of Hope” providing sanctuary to “fallen and friendless” women, with the aim of providing them with “habits of sobriety, industry and obedience” and the domestic skills that would give them the means of earning a living.
“When we moved in two years ago, we were handed a thick pile of documents about the history of the house, and I began researching. One story that caught my imagination was of two women who missed their curfew and were locked out for the night – they were intoxicated, apparently, and started a riot in the street.”
Moralioğlu makes party dresses that have the grandeur of ballgowns but none of the stuffiness. Organza ruffles end in ravaged hems. Creamy knits are punctured all over with punkish piercings of jet embroidery. Taking a deep dive into the story of his stop-out Victorian minxes, Moralioğlu crushed floral taffeta dresses under heavy coats, added stompy boots, gelled hair into bedraggled kiss curls at the throat. “I love the idea that they’d been locked out in the rain and kind of went on a hallucinogenic bender” he said.
It is a folk tradition of London fashion week, which sets it apart from the more sanitised catwalks of Milan and Paris, for the shows to tell stories about the female experience that are salty and earthy, bawdy and raw. This heritage, which prizes the raw-edged glamour of high drama over the unwrinkled polish of high maintenance, owes much to Westwood and her influence on subsequent generations of designers.
But this show was also personal for Moralioğlu, who is as at home in a library as in a design studio and has always been tickled by Victoriana, with its cross-currents of propriety and undoneness. Absinthe greens and frosted lilacs in the collection were taken directly from layers of wallpaper he found when renovating and researching his home. For this Sunday morning show, lightbulbs flickering just above head height and a soundtrack of footsteps on creaking floorboards brought a sense of claustrophobic intimacy to the Sadlers Wells venue.
