Amongst the sumptuous white lace collars, the roses and the tulips, there’s a portrait of another woman behind the Erdem pre-spring collection. This week—on the eve of celebrating his 20th anniversary—Erdem Moralioglu was talking about coming across the work of 17th-century Maria Sibylla Merian, the pioneering German naturalist. “She really is the basis, pre-Darwin, of figuring out the cycle of animal life. She did that by observing and illustrating the life of a butterfly, from cocoon to butterfly,” he said. “But what I also found so fascinating is that she was a Calvinist. She was from a very religious background. But, equally, she divorced her first husband, which was unheard of, and she traveled with her daughter to South America and discovered new species.”
Serendipity led him to Merian’s hand-painted etchings at Chatsworth House, while he was there researching Duchess Debo, the muse behind his two 2024 collections. Then—chills—it transpired that Erdem’s show venue for the past four seasons, the British Museum, also owns the UK’s other important Merian collection. It’s a thread of connections made even more perfect by the fact that fantastical botanical prints have been a signature of Erdem’s collections since day one.
The way he weaves historical references into his clothes has become evermore gorgeously textural. The feel of his 17th-century guipure lace collars, slightly crumpled antique-y metallic satin skirts and dresses, ‘hairy’ jacquards, hand-embroideries, and exuberant 3-d flower appliqués is rich and ornate. Still, as always, every idea is fused into his sense of modernity, shaped by practice and a granular understanding of the clothes his extensive international audience enjoys and needs to wear, where and why.
With Erdem, they never risk perambulating abroad in costume. Here you see that assured knack in lots of ways. The idea of a Flemish portrait neckline is preserved, yet casualized, in a lace tunic caught in a side-drape at the waist, worn over wide-leg grain de poudre black trousers. “I think it’s a kind of t-shirt, really,” he remarked. “The bib collar is removable.”
There’s his chic version of a cover-all opera coat, garlanded with flowers—a grand, simple, ageless solution. Or the way he’s “taken apart a cocktail dress,” dividing it into bodice or bralette and a skirt, over which graphically oversized prints of parrot tulips and roses run riot. To complete the picture, there’s the eccentricity of his pointy satin kitten heel evening pumps, which are somehow organically sprouting tendrils. Plus iterations of his signature bag—inevitably named Bloom—which combines a minimal, seamless form finished with a gilded rosebud on the strap.
Yet for all the loveliness and surface texture, if you tune in your ear, there’s always something subtextually pointed about Erdem’s choice of muses. Maria Sybilla Merian came from an era, he pointed out, “where it was the tail end of the witch trials happening in Holland, England, and Salem.” Instead, she was a woman who obsessively documented the evidence of what she observed with her own eyes. “I thought there was something so interesting about this puritanical kind of religiousness versus science. I found the push and pull between the religious kind of Protestant thing, contrasted with a female scientist really interesting,” he said. “And quite contradictory.”
We are where we are now—with scientists and artists both on the ‘suspect’ list in many countries. Erdem’s muse was both an artist and a scientist. Somehow, when his fall show plays out at the British Museum in September, it feels like we’ll be hearing and seeing a lot more about her.
