5 Things To Know About Erdem’s Austerely Glamorous AW22 Show
For autumn/winter 2022, Erdem Moralioglu imagined the night lives of four extraordinary women from Berlin’s 1930s arts scene. Vogue’s fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen reports on the Sadler’s Wells spectacular.
1/5The show took place at the Sadler’s Wells
As silence fell upon a black box inside the Sadler’s Wells, a pianist took to a grand piano and began to play a dramatic solo. From the ceiling, pillars of dusty spotlights shot through the blackened-out room as Erdem’s austere, androgynous, unsettling – and totally beautiful – collection meandered around the arena. “I liked the idea that it was a club, and maybe they were on their way out, like ghosts. It’s the end of the night and they’re trailing away…” he said backstage, before detailing the historical influence that inspired the collection.
2/5The collection referenced Berlin in the 1930s
Following the launch of his second men’s collection in January, Moralioglu wasn’t done exploring its muse, the photographer Madame d’Ora, who embodied the free and alternative spirit of 1930s’ Berlin in a time of political unrest. Imagining how her nightlife might have been, he found another four muses to join her: the painters Jeanne Mammen and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler, and the dancers Anita Berber and Valeska Gert, who were all contemporaries of d’Ora and personified the cross-dressing, sexually ambiguity, and liberated identities of the time.
3/5It was a continuation of Erdem’s menswear
“There was something about the effect of doing menswear, and the exercise of adding that masculinity into the collection, and maybe thinking of the extremes of femininity and masculinity mixed together,” Moralioglu explained, using Karen Elson’s opening look of a floral-embroidered black men’s coat with a black sequined evening scarf and big leather boots – “that double-breasted broadness” – as an illustration of his intentions. It set a muted and reduced mood for the collection, which was mesmerising through an Erdem lens.
4/5It was disintegration chic
As tailoring blended into dresses, the feeling of reduction persisted. Fabrics looked disintegrated and tattered as if they were unravelling before your eyes, all of it – of course – expressed through the most delicate hand-embroideries, fringing, and beading. When Moralioglu got dramatic, intense black panels of sequins cut through lace dresses or burst out from the folds of box-pleated skirts, rustling unnervingly as the models made their way around the empty black space, the ghost of a cabaret club echoing in the walls.
5/5It’s monk-strapped riding boots for autumn
If you could tear your eyes away from the melancholy theatre unfolding on his runway, Moralioglu proposed some hugely desirable accessories for autumn, including the knee-high black leather riding boots with monk straps, wide-soled brogues styled with knee-high socks, and elbow-length opera gloves adorned with industrial studs.