Read about Erdem, a lean fashion house of just 5 employees, which includes the designers, and how they won the $200,000.00 Vogue Designer Fund...
By Lisa Armstrong
Meet Erdem, candidate for the title of World’s Most Modest Designer — no, really — and, I can reveal today, winner of the first British Fashion Council and Vogue Designer Fund.
He may already be a favourite of Sarah Brown, Samantha Cameron, Keira Knightley and Michelle Obama, but 24 hours after being given the good news about the £200,000 award this week, he called back to check that there hadn’t been a mistake.
There hadn’t, although it was closely contested. There was a lot at stake. This is by far the biggest sum ever awarded to a fashion designer in this country: enough to have a significant impact on a fledgeling label. In some cases, it might make the difference between there being a future and not being one.
After the eight nominees made their presentations back in January, there was much feverish among the panel of twenty industry experts — a mixture of retailers from Harrods, Marks & Spencer and Topshop, who all contributed to the fund, and one journalist (me), headed up by the Vogue Editor, Alexandra Shulman.
After a long day of grilling, number-crunching and even a Lib Demish counter move to split the award, a decision was eventually reached. There was a recount. Then, just as the panellists gathered their belongings to go home, there was another.
This is how it should be when the contenders are of such a high quality. How do you compare the subversive brilliance of Christopher Kane’s stunning dresses with Nicholas Kirkwood’s sculptural shoes? Is there any mileage in asking whether the recently relaunched traditional menswear label E. Tautz, with its commitment to British craftsmanship, is a more worthwhile venure than Angel Jackson, the company set up by two sisters to make affordable, ethically sourced (and great-looking) handbags in Bali and Portugal?
In the end, we decided that Erdem had it all: creativity, the potential for longevity and a well-thought-out strategy. Just as importantly, his timing was right: this seemed to the judges to be the moment for a big cash injection to his business. Time will tell if we made the right decision.
Even if the name Erdem currently registers a blank in your knowledge bank (a Latin American dance festival? the currency of Burkina Faso?), you’re likely to be familiar with some of his gorgeous, herbaceous-border printed clothes.
Sarah Brown chose one of his dresses when she hosted a party at Downing Street last September. Samantha Cameron owns several of his pieces (“They’re a great way to add pattern and colour to an outfit,” she says). Romola Garai stole the Bafta for Loveliest Dress in her strapless Erdem in February. Keira Knightley pulled the same trick at the Lawrence Olivier awards earlier this month, and Michelle Obama has worn one of his skirts.
That’s an impressive haul for a label that employs only five people, including the designer. But charm is universally appealing. While Erdem Moralioglu’s peers rediscover minimalism or the new “new look”, or otherwise attempt to acclimatise to the coming era of demure, below-the-knee lengths and cleavage-free dressing, he skips along his own flower-and-butterfly-strewn path. “I’m not really interested in trends,” he says. “I hate the word ‘useful’.”
I don’t think he’s being contrary. He means that he’s not trying to come up with multi-tasking, capsule-wardrobe type clothes. He's been there — when he was employed by Diane Von Furstenberg for a year in New York. What that taught him was that he needed to work for himself. He designs lushly romantic clothes that happen to have an intriguing primness about them. The models on his catwalk exude a sophisticated, buttoned-up sense of self-containment.
Cameron, who collaborated with Erdem last year on a range of Smythson notebooks decorated with his prints, says that his shows make you feel “as though you’re in a Russian novel”. But they never look saccharine. He’s sufficiently of the modern world to want his clothes to have an undercurrent of darkness. One of his earliest collections featured a leather coat lined with Victorian-style momentoes mori in gold foil. No wonder he stayed only a year in New York.
His overriding aim is to make women look beautiful. “I never think about what’s sexy,” he says. “That’s about context. I don’t agonise over whether her bum will look big in something. I focus on the silhouettes and the proportions and hope that takes care of everything.”
He has been focusing on silhouettes for most of his 32 years. When he was 6 his parents took him to see The Nutcracker in his native Montreal. Afterwards, at home, he quietly got on with designing costumes out of paper for the entire corps de ballet. Later on, the margins of his maths books teemed with the etiolated figures that he still sketches now.
“Clearly I was never going to be a huge hit on the soccer field,” he laughs. Fitting in was a challenge. He was, and is, extremely close to his twin sister Sara, a documentary film-maker with whom he shares a flat round the corner from his studio in East London. I’m intrigued to know how his flat is decorated — he shows all the hallmarks of being a soft-furnishings obsessive. “I did rescue a pile of World of Interiors magazines from a skip recently,” he concedes. “But my friends describe my taste as tat and crap.”
In future tomes about Nature versus Nurture, there should be a chapter on how many designers find their vocation when they’re small children. The Moralioglus were hardly embedded in the fashion world. His Turkish father, who died seven years ago, was a chemical engineer. His English mother stayed at home to look after him and Sara. “This was suburban Montreal,” he says. “Picturesque, and categorically uninterested in fashion. But I was that teenager in the basement recording Fashion File [a long-running cable TV show that faithfully reports every twist and turn from the world’s catwalks]. I was steeped in couture.”
His mother, whom he describes as very cultured (she died two years ago and he used an image of her on the invitation to his most recent show), introduced him and his sister to Britain; his father took them to Turkey. He is equally drawn to both, he says, but ended up doing a postgraduate degree at the Royal College of Art in London. “There was no other place,” he explains. “I wanted to be where David Hockney and Ossie Clark had studied. And I loved the idea of being in the same building as product and textile designers.”
There’s a touch of the Professor Calculus about the way he spends hours at his computer, digitally altering images — blurring, rescaling and colour-washing them — until he achieves the intensity he wants. The boffin persona is compounded by his big spectacles, neat 1940s schoolboy hair and the slow, considered, Loyd Grossman-esque cadence of his speech.
He is understandably keen to be seen as more than a reviver of pretty prints, however. The cut and finish of his clothes is exceptional: he uses the same lace as Chanel, some of his embroideries are hand-sewn in Brighton, the camel wool trench is made by Mackintosh and the silks pieces are manufactured in Italy. All those years of studying Fashion File paid off.
It’s notable how many different kinds of women are drawn to his clothes, even women who wouldn’t normally contemplate something so obviously pretty, perhaps because there’s an oddness to the beauty, and because they’re timeless and striking without being bound up with flashiness or status.
What’s sobering is how tiny some of the businesses behind London Fashion Week’s most creative names are. A turnover of around half a million pounds a year sounds a lot, but once salaries, rents, manufacturing costs, marketing and catwalk shows are accounted for, there’s remarkably little left to live on. To compete with the Pradas (turnover around £1 billion) or even the Phillip Lims (turnover £35 million) of this world and bring jobs to the UK, British designers need to do more than make beautiful clothes and accessories. To “do a Burberry” they need to expand into perfume,underwear ...
Underwear and Burberry seem a long way off when I visit his studio in the East End of London. His Kelly green Dutch push-bike is propped against a wall on the landing. His small team desperately needs more space, he says. It also needs to become a slightly less small team. The British Fashion Council and Vogue Designer Fund that he has just won should address both problems.
The idea that simple measures can make or break a designer business is what made the idea of setting up a fund so tantalising for Vogue. “It’s so frustrating that we have these talented designers who don’t seem able to grow a business,” says Shulman. “I liked the idea of the fund, which follows the American initiative of a very closely monitored mentoring programme. I am delighted with the choice of Erdem. We had a very strong range of contenders and it was a hard-fought contest, but I feel confident that Erdem has a vision that can move onwards and upwards.”
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