Erdem by Erdem Moralioglu Is a Book as Magical as the Designer’s Clothes

Across the nearly 400 pages of his new book Erdem (Rizzoli), designer Erdem Moralioglu spins narratives just as he does when he’s backstage explaining his latest collection, which is to say: intelligently, wittily, and engagingly. Over the years, I’ve heard him go deep on the relationship between poet/novelist Radclyffe Hall and sculptor Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge; Maria Callas; his heroines of the Bloomsbury Group; and Dame Margot Fonteyn. More recently, it was the artist Kaye Donachie, who painted Moralioglu’s mother, giving him a whole aesthetic and emotional place to create from. In fact, that’s the central tenet of this book, which chronicles the two-decade existence of his label, and it’s why it’s so compelling: It limns a designer’s ever-shifting processes to create a collectio