Professor Erdem Moralioglu gave an eloquent seminar on the fascinating background of his collection after his show. The usual jostling semicircle of iPhone-wielding journalists stood still for a moment as he recounted the story of how divers in the North Sea had recently surfaced with the drowned wardrobe of a lady-in-waiting for the wife of Charles I of England. We are talking about a wardrobe disaster of 1642, a ship sunk with its contents belonging to Jean Ker, Countess of Roxburghe, who was on a trip to the Netherlands for a top-secret mission to sell off some of the Crown Jewels on Queen Henrietta Maria’s behalf. The King was in desperate need of cash to pay his troops to fight the impending civil war at home. “She was a spy, really!” Moralioglu related, drawing breath. “Anyways! I thought, too, about the beach in Deauville, and then I imagined Jean Ker’s army of women landing there in the 1930s.” A pause before the conclusion: “Both the thirties and the 1640s were times [on the brink] of war.”
Those were the whys and wherefores of a collection in which diamond clusters were secreted in seams and crevices of dresses; and silks were woven at Vanners, one of the oldest mills in England; and floral prints, on close inspection, included crowns and the Roman numeral XII—“because the ship which went down was the twelfth in the fleet.” At the beginning, the blue micro-flowered jacket, shown with pants and matching platforms, was a 17th-century inspiration taken from a visit to the Fashion Museum in Bath. The original has ribbons for fastenings, and Moralioglu took that haberdashery notion—in black grosgrain—to make shoulder straps (they hold up the plunging, off-the-shoulder dresses), as well as jacket fastenings.
Does one need to know this treatise to appreciate the fashion Erdem put forth for next spring and summer with its very obviously wedding-appropriate white broderie anglaise floor-length dresses and its lovely varieties of the drifty floral frocks which every young and not-so-young woman seems to be wearing this fall? Obviously not, but knowledge is nourishing, and the enjoyment of chasing Professor Moralioglu’s references around the Internet is part of the pleasure of his work.
