Across the nearly 400 pages of his new book Erdem (Rizzoli), designer Erdem Moralioglu spins narratives just as he does when he’s backstage explaining his latest collection, which is to say: intelligently, wittily, and engagingly. Over the years, I’ve heard him go deep on the relationship between poet/novelist Radclyffe Hall and sculptor Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge; Maria Callas; his heroines of the Bloomsbury Group; and Dame Margot Fonteyn. More recently, it was the artist Kaye Donachie, who painted Moralioglu’s mother, giving him a whole aesthetic and emotional place to create from. In fact, that’s the central tenet of this book, which chronicles the two-decade existence of his label, and it’s why it’s so compelling: It limns a designer’s ever-shifting processes to create a collection, and those—whether inspirational sources or close collaborators—who help along the way.
“I didn’t want the book to feel chronological, but rather something very personal, a manifesto, almost, of how I’ve approached creating this body of work over the last twenty years,” Moralioglu tells me one bright autumnal morning in his Paris showroom, which is humming with activity. (Between us chatting, he’s fielding congratulations on his spring 2026 collection every five minutes.) “There is, yes, the chronology of the thumbnails of every single collection I’ve done. But the book is much more than that.”
Indeed it is. Just before the holidays last year, I had visited Moraliglu at his London atelier, where there were boards and boards of layouts and pages and ideas—a sense of order finding its place amidst creative spontaneity. Erdem is, thank goodness, more than a repository of look book images and advertising campaigns, so often the curse of the contemporary designer monograph. I will always remember one colleague sniffing and declaring the glut of such dull unimaginative books as “the new scented candle”—i.e., omnipresent, inescapable, and something everyone has done.
There’s no danger of that here. Instead, Moralioglu offers an intimate snapshot of who and what makes him tick, which runs the gamut: There’s a breakdown of key books in his library, from Irving Penn’s Flowers to Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin; we read Moralioglu in conversation with the majestic Glenn Close; novelist and editor Hanya Yanagihara contributes an original short story about a dress; chef Ruth Rogers, of London’s River Café fame, came up with a recipe inspired by his clothing; and British playwright Polly Stenham offers an excerpt from a play. And then there are contributions from writer Charlie Porter, British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan, and Andrew Bolton of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York….
All that said, his clothes, which exalt craft and vision—someone just noted on Instagram that Erdem Moralioglu, fashion-wise, is the last of the great romantics, which is pretty much true—are well to the fore, perhaps most beautifully in the series of images of model Guinevere Van Seenus wearing a look from every collection, shot by Amsterdam photo artist Paul Kooiker. The images manage to evoke the light of the Dutch Golden Age of art, but with the absolute attitude of today, which pretty much sums up what Moralioglu does. (The designer said that Van Seenus, whom he met early in his career via filmmaker Liz Goldwyn and the stylist and vintage curator Yana Kamps, simply had to be in the book because “Guinevere’s beyond a model—she’s like an actress the way she brings things to life, and with this extraordinary beauty. Amidst everything going on in the book, to have these images of her… they bring such a sense of purity.”)
Moralioglu, who had been working on Erdem for a few years, found that putting the book together was a process of meditation on, and a discovery of, his own past—including the span of time when he stepped away from the design table and picked up a camera, shooting images for Polish Vogue, Acne Paper, and British Harper’s Bazaar. “You’re using a different part of your brain,” he said of that work. “Suddenly you’re putting your clothes in an entirely different context.” There will be those who pick up Erdem unaware of these images—or maybe unaware of many of the strands and connections which make up both his fashion and this book—and Moralioglu is more than happy about that. “I like the fact that someone who doesn’t know me can open it up, and have quite a clear idea,” he said, “of who I am as a designer, and as a person.”
