ERDEM FALL 2022

There was a point in the Erdem show where a series of muted fleurs de nuit jacquard dresses seemed to disintegrate before your eyes, the threads of their hems unraveling into fringes that wrapped around the models’ ankles like spiderwebs. It was the most exquisite moment of the designer’s darkest and most unnerving collection to date, and one of his most ravishing ever.

The collection imagined the nightlives of a group of extraordinary women who embodied Berlin’s progressive cultural spirit in the 1930s: the painters Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler; the dancers Anita Berber and Valeska Gert; and photographer Madame d’Ora, whose work and being already played muse to the men’s collection Moralioglu launched last month and filtered onto his runway today.

Nearly a century before terms like “non-binary” and “fluid” would be added to our gender-oriented vocabularies, artists like these were cross-dressing and opening Germany’s first lesbian bars amid the looming gloom of war and extreme conservatism. Moralioglu is an expert at mirroring contemporary waves in the motifs of the past: he didn’t need to say it, the parallels were clear.

“It was interesting, that time and period. I liked the idea that it was club, and maybe they were on their way out, like ghosts. It’s the end of the night and they’re trailing away…” he said backstage at Sadler’s Wells, where a smoke-filled black box lit up by dusty pillars of light, featuring a dramatic solo pianist, created an opulent and melancholy cabaret-like mood. Like his choice of venue, Moralioglu’s collection expressed itself through the language of reduction.

Every look was characterized by its own distinctive sense of degenerated glamour: unraveling like those jacquard dresses, tattered like the hammered ivory silk dress pulled down to the floor by lavish black beading, dominated like a grey skirt-suit invaded by gunmetal studs, fragile like the transparent black dress hand-sewn from tulle strips and embroidered with tiny pearls or deconstructed like the lace dresses slashed open by the sharpness of shiny, black sequined panels.

Often, these elements read like a different language for Moralioglu: yes, founded in history as his practice prescribes, but thought- and fear-provoking in a way that felt entirely relevant through a current socio-political lens. It was an astute and totally mesmerizing theater for the senses, and for the mind.

Images of Erdem.