There’s fashion fame and there’s mainstream fame. For over ten years, Erdem has been a star within his industry: a person illustrious enough to go by one name only, like Cher or Madonna in the real world. As I spot him across the room at Bellanger on Islington Green, casually waiting for me at our table, I wonder if these may be his final days of relative civilian anonymity. It’s a Sunday night just four sleeps before his highly publicised H&M collaboration hits the retail giant’s shelves worldwide; before all sorts of people from all around the globe, most of whom never heard of Erdem two weeks ago, will be wearing his trademark starry-night florals and Hitchcockian mid-century dresses, his name etched in the back of their necks - and minds - forever. “It’s strange,” he admits, with typical Canadian monotony. “I was shopping on Regent Street the other day and someone asked me if I were me.”
Everybody likes to be famous for their work, but truthfully, Erdem Moralioglu never pursued the spotlight. Not because he’s bashful or shy, but because he was always too busy perfecting his craft and his company and creating his ideal world. “I just want to work on Pre-Fall,” he shrugs with comedic timing, just back from an all but low-key promotion tour for the H&M collection in New York and Los Angeles. He didn’t do that collaboration for the fame, either, by the way; nor for the money. His own brand, every percent of which belongs to him, boasts a reported annual turnover of £13 million. “To me, the success of the collaboration is the clothing. I’m excited to see people enjoy it,” he tells me. “I wanted to disrupt the idea of what fast fashion is; I wanted to make the perfect grey suit that you’d keep forever because it fits you so beautifully.”
""I’m interested in longevity, which I guess is the opposite approach to how these collaborations usually work”"
Erdem introduced the Swedish megastore to small Italian and Scottish mills – “people like Harris Tweed” – and kept production for the collection within the borders of Europe. It resulted in the first H&M designer collaboration of its quality, and surely a slightly more elevated price point than past instalments? “Un petit peu,” he quips, with perfect pronunciation. (At £139.99 for an exquisite cocktail coat, however, a little bit goes a long way.) “Certainly, there’s the idea of permanence. I’m interested in longevity, which I guess is the opposite approach to how these collaborations usually work,” Erdem reflects. Nothing represents a greater contrast to what this designer represents than the high street, with its assembly line production and instant gratification. Every aspect of Erdem’s world is carefully crafted, curated and controlled.
His day begins with coffee in his Dalston residence at 6.30am; then he returns to bed, Princess Margaret style, before his 7.30am calisthenics workout. He arrives at his Whitechapel studio for 9.30am and usually works through lunch at 1pm, within the frames of his office where shelves are abound with the literature that fuels his mind. After dinner at 8pm, typically prepared by his boyfriend Philip, he’ll read. Currently it’s My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent, but Erdem’s recently-purchased history on Amazon is a never-ending scroll of titles, from Cecil Beaton’s New York to Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity, and Edmund White’s The Burning Library to Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs and Collected Plays, which Erdem spent the summer reading. He’s also a passionate collector.
Recent antique wins include a picture of Wallace Simpson from an auction in Paris, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’s tablecloth and napkins with their WE initials intertwined, and a photo collage by David Hockney. From his embellished words to his romantic references, Erdem thrives on painstaking precision. His hair is cut in a razor-sharp 1950s schoolboy coif to match his tortoiseshell James Dean glasses, he’s wearing an Edward VIII-style fair isle jumper by Cordings with grey trousers from the H&M collaboration, and he orders a truffle-infused white bean and celeriac soup followed by calves’ liver with gem lettuce. “I think liver must be good for you. It’s like something someone’s dad would order. My dad was really into offal. There was always something strange in the casserole. My mum was more of a roast person.” His father was a chemical engineer from Turkey, his mother a homemaker from the Midlands.
They raised Erdem and his twin sister Sara Moralioglu, now an acclaimed documentary filmmaker, in suburban Montreal, in a neighbourhood he’s often described to me as a little bit unsettling, like the eerie quality that’s always present within his dreamy floral fashion realm. A master of subtext, it’s as if things somehow always seem too perfect to be true. “Stranger Things,” he says, referring to the Netflix series: “It’s about ten year olds in 1987. I was born in 1977, so it’s all the things I grew up with: the cars they drive, the food they eat, where I grew up: the big lake at the end of the street… the big forest.” Young Erdem spent his childhood drawing in the basement, dreaming himself away in Old Hollywood cinema, classic fashion imagery, and the master painters his mother, an admirer of art, educated him on. She was homesick, forever surrounding herself with references from the Britain she was born in.
Brideshead Revisited was on PBS,” Erdem recalls. “Do you remember Maurice? Room with a View, Wilde…” Inevitably, a teenaged Erdem became obsessed with the idea of England represented in those films. “It was fetishising something that was so close to you and so far away.” Since he launched his womenswear label in 2005, after graduating from the Royal College of Art, he’s never expressed those particular references as clearly as in his menswear debut for the co-ed H&M collaboration, which could have been the wardrobe of an Oxford student in the 1920s. Perhaps a preppy teenage fantasy finally realised? “No, it was much more personal. I very much designed it in part for myself. I mean, if you’re designing it for the boy you want to fall in love with it would just be a wet t-shirt,” he notes, impeccably deadpan. Erdem may have a penchant for a Victorian ruff, but Victorian he is not.
"“It was such a beautiful story to tell at quite a specific moment in time, when everything around us feels really dark; the xenophobia and the situation we find ourselves in”"
His mother died in 2007, only a few years after he lost his father to cancer. He now lives with his architect boyfriend of fourteen years, Philip Joseph, who designed his flagship store in Mayfair’s South Audley Street, a monument to the incredible success Erdem has gained over the past twelve years, building from scratch - with no backing or family fortune - the most flourishing independent fashion business of his generation of London designers. This month he celebrates not only his ultimate foray into household name designer status with the H&M collaboration, but also his fortieth birthday. “The nicest compliment is when you see extraordinary, amazing, strong, fiercely intelligent women wearing what you do,” he reflects. They’ve included everyone from the Duchess of Cambridge to Michelle Obama, but he loved it when Diana Ross wore one of his sequins looks. “Head to toe,” he smiles, and takes a sip of mint tea with honey and fresh lemon. “Ain’t no mountain high enough.”
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