“It’s never about a portrait of someone—never painted from life—but rather fragments of a character.” Erdem Moralioglu began a conversation about his pre-fall collection with a description of the evocative, romantic paintings of Kaye Donachie, but he might’ve been talking about his own work. Purely coincidentally, Donachie graduated in fine art from London’s Royal College of Art a few years ahead of when Moralioglu graduated from the fashion program, but the imaginative ways that the two alums highlight the histories of women has strange symmetry. “We have a kind of similarity of approaches.”
Anyone who follows—or wears—Erdem is familiar with the female character studies that background his collections. His host of splendid, talented, eccentric, radical, and sometimes tragic heroines stretches back to include Maria Callas; Debo, Duchess of Devonshire; Radclyffe Hall; Tina Modotti; Adele Astaire; the Victorian botanist Marianne North; and many more. In the same way, Donachie has invented her own poetic impressionist techniques, blurrily picturing the faces of literary women and muses in her delicate washes of blue-tinted brush-work.
So you could call Moralioglu’s pre-fall collection the initial sketches for his fall runway show. A full collaboration with Donachie will be revealed at London Fashion Week in February. Their joint starting point has been the portrait Donachie made of Moralioglu’s late mother. “I commissioned Kaye, because she has this method of re-imagining people that she’s never met. She painted my mother as a young woman, before I could have known her.”
The slightly blurry photography hints at the atmospheric artistry behind the inspiration: the “quick, gestural strokes” of florals and embroideries; the blues of printed denim evoking Donachie’s cyanotypes. The result, however, is as laser-sharply focused as everything Moralioglu ever makes. It is a collection that partially looks as if it might have been pulled out of a dressing-up box—perma-creases and all—yet is full of modern craftsmanship and a real sense of where these clothes will be going, and who will want to be wearing them next year.
