“She’s always talked about this idea of creating abstract portraits. They’re never really from life, but rather an abstraction, an emotional feeling.”
Artist collaborations in fashion are a commonplace, but the one between Erdem Moralioglu and the painter Kaye Donachie which emerged at his fall show held a special poetry and poignance. At the heart of it was Donachie’s portrait of his late mother Marlene, which the designer commissioned a decade ago. Stepping into view down a long staircase at the British Museum, her likeness, painted in Donachie’s ethereal washy blues, was imprinted on the first dress which appeared—a simple, notional wrap-around ‘canvas’ shape.
Donachie was in the front row. “It’s been rewarding to work with him,” she said. “Because we have a similar sensibility in how we approach archival material, how we process ideas, and have used parts of history to become kind of fictions.”
The commonality between her work and the way Moralioglu gets inspired is almost uncanny. He’s essentially also a painter of portraits—his nearly 25-year career might be thought of as a gallery of romantic dabbed-at impressions of women. That list is as long as your arm: Maria Callas, Debo, Duchess of Devonshire, Radclyffe Hall, Tina Modotti, Adele Astaire, Queen Elizabeth II, and more, linked only by the fact that the designer couldn’t have known his subjects.
His late mother, who died tragically young in 2007 when Moralioglu was just getting on his feet, has also recurred as a constant muse.
“I spoke about her to Kaye, described her, gave her loads of photos of her as a young woman and as an older woman. Kaye listened and looked at everything, and just almost put everything to one side, and created a portrait of the person that she kind of imagined.
Moralioglu’s outline sketches for the collection conjured an impression of 1950s nipped-waist dresses and suits, cocoon coats and sheath dresses. The real work was in translating Donachie’s faces, delicate hand gestures and doodles of flowers into all manner of techniques and textures.
They got enlarged to almost abstract scale on the neoprene cocoon coat, printed ethereally on techno organza, and were faithfully replicated in collage. “We dyed 50 different shades of organza by hand.”
In other places, the idea of quick brush strokes, paints mixed on palettes and scribbled flowers got embroidered in wool onto leather and made into deep 3-d blue and pink chiffon embroidery. Donachie painted vignettes of abstract flowers directly onto some of the bags.
Even some of the single-color things, like the spiky black sequins, reminded Moralioglu of obsessive crayon marks. The effect: romantic and nostalgic; an artistic gesture of memory and love. The rawness of the loss of his mother was only hinted at in one thing: PJ Harvey’s voice, singing “ Love will Tear Us Apart Again” over and over, acapella.
