Erdem’s narrative was close to home
As Erdem Moralıoğlu’s guests took their seats in the blackened-out Sadler’s Wells theatre, a voice could be heard reading aloud from The Yellow Wallpaper from 1892. “It’s a story of a woman who slowly goes mad because there’s arsenic in her wallpaper,” he said backstage, not entirely unexcitedly. “I love that idea.” You could imagine how the mind of Moralıoğlu – a true storyteller who’s addicted to history – had started spinning when he peeled off the wallpaper in the Georgian house he bought in Bloomsbury two years ago to find walls covered in toxic colours like “absinthe and apple green and lilac”. The mad Victorian ghosts that haunted his runway this season were the imagination sparked by those discoveries, and the history he uncovered in the house.
It was based on Victorian Houses of Hope
In the 1860s, the house Moralıoğlu shares with his interior architect husband Philip Joseph served as a so-called House of Hope for “fallen and friendless women”. Upon discovering its history, he immersed himself in research that soon formed a narrative for his collection. “Maybe, what brought them to that house was most likely the death of someone – a father or a husband,” he thought to himself, and decided to open the show with a look that picked up where his black-veiled funeral march for Queen Elizabeth II left off last season: an all-black floral coat that exploded into a full black skirt at the back, the dialogue between which set the tone for Moralıoğlu’s Victorian collection.
Models wore lockets and broken keys
“Our house was where the children were born,” Moralıoğlu noted, referring to his research. It inspired lockets and broken keys evocative of the trinkets mothers would leave their children at the orphanage so they might recognise them if they were fortunate enough to be reunited a decade on. It’s easy to view Moralıoğlu’s history-driven narratives as pure theatre – and he wouldn’t mind that either – but this designer is no escapist. As with all his tales, this season’s horror story and its representations of the misery of Victorian England felt like a pointed parallel to the present-day state of the union: the cost of living crisis and the unbelievable accounts of poverty that have become daily news in 2023.
It was also a horror story
Through his research, Moralıoğlu unearthed a story from the 1860s. “Two of the women who were staying there had missed a curfew at one point and weren’t allowed in the house. They were intoxicated and they had incited a riot in the square.” As an image of the black-clad Victorian women left out in the rain, he suspended light-bulbs from the theatre’s ceiling like huge droplets, soaked his models’ hair, and embroidered garments with glistening black beads that resembled raindrops. His horror was electrified by the toxic greens, yellows, pinks and lilacs that intensified the danger of psychotically twisted dresses and gowns so bulbous they evoked ideas of disfigurement, something Moralıoğlu likened to “a hallucinogenic reverie of Victorian preoccupation with madness and absinthe and undone-ness.”
Erdem paid tribute to Dame Vivienne Westwood
If there was an added Englishness to the Erdem experience this season, a certain legend may have been on his mind. Three days before the show, he attended the memorial of Dame Vivienne Westwood, whom he interned with as part of his training. “I remember, in 2000, sitting cross-legged and she’d let work placements attend fittings and watch her and Andreas [Kronthaler] drape on the stand and look at the archive, which was extraordinary,” he reminisced. “It was the only work placement I ever did and I really loved her. When I was there, that’s when I decided that this was what I wanted to do. It was an important time for me.”
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