This article first appeared on Vogue Business.
You know the phrase when it rains, it pours? It applies perfectly to Erdem Moralıoğlu, whose brand will celebrate its 20th anniversary at the beginning of 2026. As a precursor to the celebrations, the designer put together his first monograph with Rizzoli, and today is opening the brand’s second store in London — a decade after opening its flagship on South Audley Street in Mayfair.
Over the last 20 years, Moralıoğlu has developed his London-based company into one of the city’s jewels; the clothes are intricate and highly coveted, the clientele is chic and eclectic, ranging from Kate Middleton to Erin O’Connor, and the shows traditionally take place in the British Museum — which is a flex in itself.
The company has two other stores globally; both are in Seoul, opened in August 2024 and March 2025. All stores have been designed in collaboration with P Joseph Architecture Design — the firm owned by Moralıoğlu’s husband, Philip Joseph. I got on a Zoom with the pair to discuss stores, design and store design.
Vogue: You have one store in London and two stores in Seoul. Why open a second store in London and not anywhere else in the world?
Erdem: We opened South Audley Street over 10 years ago. That store has doubled its sales in the last three years. Even compared to last year, it grew over 20 per cent. So there’s still scope for that customer to discover the brand. And this opportunity came up on Sloane Street, which we felt was a good way to reach our client in a different part of London.
Philip: There’s renewed energy on Sloane Street. They did a huge amount of work to the streets to make it a much more appealing place to shop, with wider pavements and tree lines, and now it has a more international vibe about it. The adjacencies are fantastic — we are across the street from huge international brands. The Mayfair store is a bit more tucked away, so the Sloane Street store’s purpose is to drive awareness.
Erdem: South Audley Street is much more about clienteling — a space for the current customer to have individual appointments. With Sloane Street, we are hoping to widen that client base.
Vogue: Wholesale retail has faced many challenges since the pandemic. Are you finding a need to get to your customer more directly?
Erdem: There’s tremendous power to having a space of your own, which allows you to show your customer your world. A show only gives you eight minutes to take someone into your world, and it’s fleeting. A space is much more permanent. Direct-to-consumer is over a third of our turnover. We have a handful of owned and operated retail spaces and we live in a very unstable climate.
Vogue: You are longtime partners in life, but also, this isn’t the first time you are working together. What is it like working together? What are the learnings and what are the challenges?
Philip: I would say it’s different this time actually. When we did the first store, I actually left my previous job that I’d had for 10 years to start my own practice. And the South Audley store was the first project. There was a lot of pressure in that moment because it was our first project together, our first moment to express ourselves. This time around, we’re an established practice, and that means we are kind of calmer, wouldn’t you say, Erdem?
Erdem: Philip has seen every single collection of mine since I graduated. He used to design the show spaces before we moved to showing at the British Museum. Who better to build a world around the brand than the person you’ve grown up with?
Vogue: How do you feel the brand has changed in the last 10 years, since you established South Audley?
Erdem: There’s a kind of a roundedness to her that maybe wasn’t there 10 years ago — there’s now more knitwear, tailoring and accessories, for instance. But in a way, she’s also constant.
Vogue: You keep saying ‘she’ and ‘her’. Who is she?
Erdem: She’s the customer, the muse — it’s her. The person in my sketchbooks, and the person that propels my ideas.
Vogue: How does she come up in the stores?
Erdem: You know, when we sat down to figure out what that initial store could be — Philip, not to speak for you, but your approach was quite forensic, wouldn’t you say? Like, what art would she collect? What furniture would she sit on? What carpet would be appropriate for her changing area?
Philip: In my mind, she’s a collage of many women who we know and actually wear the brand. So it’s a matter of imagining her environment, building a picture around her. But I think what’s interesting this time around is that we have had the Mayfair store for 10 years. There is this sort of awful trend now of store concepts being seen as disposable — that they have to constantly change.
It was very important to us when we did South Audley Street that the store felt timeless and enduring and permanent. And the really wonderful thing is that we literally have not touched it in 10 years, and it still feels great to be in. All these decisions surrounding the quality of the materials and the craftspeople we were working with were so carefully made at the beginning and that’s really paid off. We approached the making of Sloane Street in the same way. We just evolved the experience.
Vogue: Let’s get a little bit more technical. How did you make that work design-wise?
Philip: South Audley Street is in this 19th century building that still had some of the original historic fixtures, so you could play off that. In contrast, the Sloane Street store is in a lovely 1920s building, but quite a featureless retail space. So we thought of it more as a sort of atelier or her studio, and decided to collaborate with Robin Brown, who’s an incredibly talented production designer that we have also worked on shows with in the past. He worked with scenic painters to create a new language of wall panels and armatures. Armatures that support clothes rails, shelves, a vitrine, sculpture and for hanging artwork. The wall panels are wrapped in coarse canvas that were conceived as a single abstract artwork by scenic painters in the brand’s signature blue colour. We will have artwork in the store, too, to reinforce this idea of her as a collector.
Erdem: Philip’s approach to the [two stores] has been that they are sisters; they relate to each other. The blue pigment that we used in South Audley Street that Philip developed, for instance, was the perfect colour to go back to and layer on the canvases, to make it feel like an artist’s studio. There’s something slightly more informal about that space. The goal with South Audley Street was to create a space that had permanence, like a beautiful jewel. Sloane Street is much more playful.
Vogue: Are you guys more relaxed and willing to be playful now because you are more established in your careers?
Philip: What is nice about being more experienced is that the necessary and more boring stuff — like making sure the lighting is brilliant and the AC is great — we can do immaculately now, and we can do it faster and more efficiently. So with those things out of the way, we have space to have fun. We can work with a scenic painter and do something a bit off-grid or whatever, because we know how to make everything else work really well.
Erdem: Overall, the Sloane Street space and the concept behind is much more personal. It’s about this blurred line between the studio and the home. The things that we’ve collected, like art by Kaye Donachie and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, the store is like this beautiful house where they can all live.
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