Yesterday, Erdem Moralioglu could be found poring over a vitrine deep in the east wing of Chatsworth House. There he was, hovering over the placement of his exactly-so finishing touches to “Imaginary Conversations,” his exhibition about Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, while showcasing the spring 2024 show spectacular he designed as a paean to her. He placed a solidly quilted floral print skirt—“probably she wore it for walking around the estate, I don’t know!”—next to a tiny yellow coin purse in the shape of a chicken. In went a pair of sensible brown walking shoes, next to a delicious pair of yellow taffeta evening shoes with bows on the toes. And as a final flourish, a red satin evening bag with Elvis picked out in diamanté.
That’s pretty much a micro-summary of the eclectic flair and character of the late Duchess Deborah—as the family calls her—right there in one cabinet. Erdem is the first researcher to be allowed into Debo’s archive since her death in 2014. She—as every fashion fanatic knows—was the Mitford sister who famously decided to marry a duke, did, and went on to effectively save Chatsworth with her entrepreneurial vim and enthusiasm for Elvis, chickens, and making friends with artists and commissioning them. One of the exhibits in the astonishing series of Chatsworth’s Regency bedrooms that Erdem’s been given the run of is Lucian Freud’s Woman in a White Shirt, his 1957 portrait of Debo. Her friendships ran from farmers to fashion designers. Delving into the archive with Susie Stokoe, Chatsworth’s Head of Textiles, Erdem discovered the straw tote bag, embroidered DEBO, that was made for her as a gift by Hubert de Givenchy.
It’s a show saturated with history, color, light, and wit—an insight into Erdem’s designing mind—and as a subtext, into the background orchestration of Laura Burlington, whose parents-in-law are the present Duke and Duchess. “Debo loved clothes and creativity,” says Laura. “When Erdem raised the idea of an exhibition, I instinctively just wasn’t sure my parents-in-law would want it. But Amanda (the Duchess of Devonshire) is an Erdem customer. She immediately said, what a great idea. I’m really not sure they’d do it for anyone else.”
Their friendship stretches back to when he was a fledgling designer in the mid-aughts, and Laura bought his first collection while she was working at London’s then multi-brand store, The Bluebird. Thanks to her, Erdem’s Debo-inspired collection, which swept along the colonnade of the British Museum in September 2023, contained fragments of floral curtains—turned into exaggerated opera-coat style waxed-jacket liners and a finale ball gown—that came out of the Chatsworth archive. Laura laughs that she watched him working and studying for days, knowing that “he was looking for the thing.”
“I think that thing,” he says, “was the curtains, the fabric she physically lived with. I’d never made something that had actually belonged to the person that the collection was based on. To have that openness and trust from the family was amazing.”
Erdem’s forensic interest in character-based historical research had sparked conversations between the two of them for ages. “Something was boiling up in me about how Debo would buy Paris couture—and dresses made by Mary Feeney in the village,” he remembers. “I came across this image, a family snap of her wearing this big waxed coat at an agricultural fair.”
The structure of another dress, with a canvas bodice and sheer flounced skirts, is directly referenced in his study of the underpinning of a 1950s Jean Patou haute couture dress he handled in the archive. Those two pieces are displayed together in The Scots bedroom—so called, because it’s located in the room where Mary Queen of Scots was imprisoned under house arrest at Chatsworth from the late 1560s (before the sixth Duke did the place, up as it is now, in the 1830s). Progressing through the rooms, Erdem’s fabrics vibrate vividly against their original inspirations—swags of chintz, falling-apart upholstery, and the incredible backdrops of Chinese hand-painted wallpaper and surreally busy Victorian floral prints. His re-interpreting wit comes into play. The rock ’n’ roll fan in Debo pops up in an Erdem-made Elvis-in-Vegas blue fringed leather motorcycle jacket and slip dresses smothered with rhinestones. A brown tweed suit has a matching pencil skirt which appears to be chicly unraveling. “Pecked by chickens!” he quips. “Quite Hitchcockian.”
A breathtaking curatorial moment happens in the darkened Alcove Room, where you suddenly find a cabinet of Duchess Deborah’s bug-shaped brooches–precious Victorian and Edwardian butterflies, dragonflies, spiders, flies, and bumblebees—apparently airborne around a 1950s photo-portrait of her. “Her husband would give her one every birthday,” Erdem relates. Then your eyes adjust to an Erdem black velvet dress with off-the-shoulder tied sleeves—the silhouette echoing the neckline Debo wears in the picture—and a pale, dotted-tulle ball gown, both of which also have sparkly bugs landed on them, this time from his resort 2024 collection.
Still, the central point of the exhibition—as Erdem and Laura agreed—is to reveal as much about how the designer works as it also celebrates his edit of Debo-iana. I felt very strongly about not having a show just about the end result, but about process,” Laura says. “ You always see these fashion exhibitions which are about the beautiful end result. It’s about how he pulls this inspiration—showing visitors his processes of turning ideas into clothes.” Visiting Erdem’s studio in London, she remembers excitedly texting photos to Susie Stokoe: “We’ve got to have his cutting table—all of this!” An evocation of his studio, his techniques, mood-boards, sketches, fabric trials, and fittings occupies a light-filled room; a crowd of pristine-white toiles, a cabinet of miniature paper-doll maquettes, rails of pattern pieces.
There’s also the underlying theme of circularity—the sense that the exhibition itself is already woven into the ongoing living legacy of Chatsworth. The dress Erdem made of ‘shattered’ curtain material that Laura had “retired” from Lismore Castle (the Devonshire estate in Ireland) was over-embroidered in jet by Cecily Lasnet, Debo’s great-granddaughter and the daughter of Stella Tennant. Other pieces by him—a pencil skirt and matching cardigan screen-printed with images of Chatsworth House—are being donated to the archive.
“It feels like a very nice, very relevant thing that this collection should be here,” Laura reflects. “These things have gone away, and they’ve had their little time going to London, and the British Museum, and they’ve gone off to New York, and they’ve been sold in France. And now they’ve come home.” Essentially, it’s also part of the family’s vision for the future of Chatsworth as something more dynamically involved with creativity than a normal stately home. “We want to share the collections with people, here and beyond our shores,” as Laura puts it. Bringing fashion into the house—as she did with her co-curation with Hamish Bowles of the monumental “House Style” exhibition in 2015—is just part of the bigger family plan that will include “arts, music, farming, and gardening.”
It all sounds very much like Duchess Deborah herself. It was she who set up the trusts to protect the collections in the first place. “She was a big personality. There’s this legacy that’s going on and on because of her.”
“Imaginary Conversations” opens at Chatsworth House on June 22 and will run until October 20, and is sponsored by Farfetch.
