A successful fashion designer
’Did people really cry?’ Erdem Moralioglu asks, a few seconds after I’ve referred to the number of teary-eyed women in the audience at his autumn/winter catwalk show back in February this year.
He looks taken aback when I assure him that they did, in turn leaving me surprised. Given the recent rhapsodies summoned up in honour of the Canadian-born, London-based designer, one might assume him well accustomed to the notion of women weeping all over his exquisite prints and embroidered frocks. Apparently not.
But then Moralioglu, 32, is a modest soul. When he comes to meet the Stella team in the reception of the big building in east London that houses his small studio his manner is so courteous and obliging – offering tea and coffee and then tootling off to make it – that for a moment I wonder if this might be the doppelgänger of a successful fashion designer.
Dressing the great and the grand clearly hasn’t gone to his head. His name may not yet be rolling off your tongue with the familiarity of a Gucci or Prada, but since he launched his label in London in 2005 Moralioglu’s elegant, feminine collections, his fondness for a longer-length dress, often smothered in beautiful print, particularly florals, and his employ of the finest embroidery and fabrics have gathered him fans such as Keira Knightley, Claudia Schiffer and Ashley Olsen.
But this year the roll-call of those who wear Erdem got serious. He dressed both Samantha Cameron and Sarah Brown – engaged during the election campaign in polite fisticuffs over who could be quite the most supportive follower of British fashion designers. Michelle Obama was a different league altogether. And Anna Wintour, esteemed editor of American Vogue ? When she wore a floral-print dress of his in June that was big news. In terms of fashion prestige, Moralioglu’s work was done. He could have packed up his pencils and put away his pins there and then.
But that’s just silly talk and Moralioglu is not only a talented creator of dresses but deadly serious about building a strong and lasting fashion label. Might he even be a little irked about the attention paid to the prominent women who’ve chosen Erdem of late?
’It doesn’t irk me,’ he says, as we talk in the distinctly non-couture environs of a drafty corridor outside his studio. ‘But I’ve never targeted someone, never actively pursued someone to dress, so it’s… neither here nor there. What was really flattering was seeing women of all ages in my clothes. At one point, in seven days, we had Michelle Obama, Sarah Brown, Thandie Newton and one of the Olsen twins [in Erdem]. That to me was great because there were a few demographics there.’ He laughs. ‘Let me put it this way. I think that the women we dress would never buy something just because someone famous has worn it. I hate that idea. I’ve never bought something because I saw a politician wear it. Or a movie star either. And I don’t think you would, would you?’
Absolutely not. I would, however, steal the dresses off their backs. Oh, to waft about in Erdem, so dreamy, so modern. Last month a floor-length, butterfly-print dress from the new autumn collection was on the cover of British Vogue ‘s C atwalk Report, the magazine’s guide to what’s hot-hot-hot for the fashion season ahead. Inside, the label cropped up again and again – not only the long printed dresses (‘pretty poetess’), but a hand-embroidered cape (‘this season’s favourite cover-up’), a boyish, crew-neck sweater over a long swishy satin skirt (‘grunge glamour’) and the Nicholas Kirkwood boots bedecked in Erdem’s digitally manipulated print (‘high-heeled hikers’), underlining just how much he is hitting the
nail on its fashionable head.
What is funny and somewhat baffling is that this collection, the one that had women weeping, was partly inspired by the 1993 film Alive – an aeroplane disaster movie mostly memorable for Ethan Hawke eating human flesh. A chance viewing of that, combined with a re-look at Picnic on Hanging Rock and photographs of Arctic skylines, emailed to him by his twin sister, Sara, who was working on a nature documentary in Siberia at the time, got the designer thinking about high school back in Montréal. ‘The way girls used to dress there. It was very snowy and the girls wore crew necks and short skirts and bare legs. Teenagers always do that, don’t they? Underdress in cold weather?’ Moralioglu has that uplift at the end of a sentence and a clipped style of speech – all charmingly squished Canadian vowels – that lend him his own youthful demeanour. In fact, in his retro Americana T-shirt and nerdy glasses he could be right back in the high-school debating team. (As a teenager he was big on extra-curricular activities, apparently.)
Anyway, he got to imagining a girl ‘trudging along the side of the Andes’. And the boyfriend sweater and the long skirt ‘was the idea of her going through everyone’s suitcases and finding things’, he says. ‘The first look of the show was a cashmere poncho with a shearling hood, [worn] with hiking boots and an Alice band. That was our girl.’
Before showtime Erdem’s girl exists only in two dimensions. ‘It’s not like she’s a tangible muse,’ he says. ‘I’ve always drawn her in profile, like someone in a storybook. She’s like a character. Each season I’ll have this many sketches – like, 300 – and we just figure out what’s going to happen to her. But I’m never thinking, “Oh, she would wear this…,” or, “Our girl would never wear that.” I just draw.’
Illustrating the collection, he says, is the most enjoyable part of what he does. ‘That and there’s the most wonderful moment when you get the dress back. Well, it’s wonderful and terrifying. It’s either totally underwhelming and terrible or totally beautiful and exactly how you imagined.’ I can’t think, I say, that they ever underwhelm. ‘Well, you can’t because they’re the ones you never see… But another moment I love is when you’re backstage before all the girls go out and they’re lined up in all their first looks and you have that fleeting second where you get to see it all – just a millisecond. And that’s when the sketchbook comes alive.’
Like all successful young designers Moralioglu is – has to be – a workaholic. We meet a couple of months or so before his next spring/summer show at London Fashion when he’s in the throes of designing and cutting, working simultaneously on prints and drapes before the factories in Italy and France shut down for August. He says that he’s in the studio every single day. And the hours will only get crazier as they get closer to the show? ‘Yes!’ he says, looking absolutely thrilled at the prospect.
He is also a self-confessed detail freak. Before he set out on his own (after attending the Royal College of Art he worked at Diane von Furstenberg in New York for a year), he went to an Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in Montréal. ‘They listed all of the mills that he used so I wrote everything down. I was like, “Taroni, da-da-da…’ He mimes a scribble. (Taroni is an Italian silk mill in Italy.) ‘I was a little obsessive about those things. But my thing was, “OK, we’re in Hackney but let’s pretend we’re
in Paris.” Even at the time I had one or two people working with me, you could kind of trick people into thinking that there were 15 people working here.’
To emulate Yves Saint Laurent is the highest standard a young designer could set for himself. ‘Yes, but that was the whole point for me,’ he says with a shrug. ‘That’s what I wanted to do. I realised when I was working at Diane von Furstenberg that I wanted to work for myself and do it my way.’
And he is – using Taroni lace while he’s at it. The label is now sold in 56 stores in more than 26 countries and yet the Erdem team is currently only seven people strong, including its designer. That’s gone up from six, since he won the first Vogue /British Fashion Council Fashion Fund Award of £200,000 earlier this year. (Twenty-four hours after he’d been told, Moralioglu rang back the BFC to check there hadn’t been a mistake. ‘I just wanted to make sure that I fully understood. I had to grasp it.’)
The invitation to the autumn/winter show had a beautiful photograph of an auburn-haired woman standing in an autumnal forest holding a bunch of rich red leaves. The woman is Erdem’s English mother, who died two years ago and was a major influence on her son. ‘She would always bring my sister and me to art galleries,’ Moralioglu remembers. ‘And show us amazing books before we went to bed. She’d read to us obviously, but she’d also show me a book on Manet or something. It was wonderful. She was an aesthete. She was conscientious to show us things that were very beautiful.’
His father, who died seven years ago, was a Turkish chemical engineer, and the couple emigrated to Canada for his job. ‘Mum was a total anglophile. She really missed home, deeply missed it. And so did my father.’ What this meant for their children, however, was a rich experience of travel and wildly different cultures. ‘The travel was amazing. A wonderful contrast. You’d find yourself at the Tower of London on a conveyor belt looking at the crown jewels and then you’d be in Topkapi in Istanbul. I’m sure that affected me. That contrast of colour and culture and contradiction. I was a child growing up in the suburbs of Montréal and then I was visiting my grandmother in Birmingham and my grandmother in Turkey and they were so different – but they were part of me. I had a really wonderful childhood.’
Interested in clothing and spectacle from an early age, at six Moralioglu designed costumes for the ballet after going to see The Nutcracker with his family. But fashion wasn’t a foregone conclusion and later he studied liberal arts and classics at college in Montréal. ‘But I was obsessed with fashion and watching Fashion File [an American television show] all the time. And we had all the French channels in Montréal. They report all the couture shows on the national news. That doesn’t happen here, so funnily enough in Montréal, pre-internet, pre-style.com, I was exposed to all this current fashion.’
He ended up coming to London to do a post-graduate degree at the Royal College of Art, which sparked his love affair with printed fabrics. ‘At the RCA my eyes were suddenly opened. You could get an MA in weave or constructed textiles or printed textiles or millinery and suddenly I found myself living in London with those wonderful fashion students. I had the most amazing time.’
He goes to the library there as often as he can and always tries to sit in the same seat. ‘And if I can’t I sit very close to whoever’s there until they leave.’
Recently, Moralioglu was in the Paris boutique Colette when the reality and responsibility of running a fashion house hit home. ‘They had all of the winter stock on the mannequins and I thought, “Oh my God, winter’s in the stores, the resort collection is done and we’re designing spring/summer 2011. “It was very real. But what was exciting was that I saw those garments and they looked exactly as they were supposed to look. They were exactly right. It’s moments like that when you pinch yourself – “I’m in Paris! “‘ He grins. ‘It’s great.’
