Erdem Moralioglu spent the season with Barbette, the Texan who put on feathers and a wig and became the talk of 1920s Paris. The Spring 2027 collection he showed on Sunday lives in the gap that performer opened up, between the man underneath and the illusion on the wire.
The show fell on the third day of London Fashion Week, a schedule that closes on Monday 21 September. Moralioglu is one of the few designers still building his shows around a single figure and following that figure all the way through. This time the figure was Barbette, born Vander Clyde in Texas, who crossed the Atlantic and turned trapeze work into an act about disguise.
Barbette worked the wire in costume, revealing at the end that the aerialist was a man. The reveal was the whole performance. Jean Cocteau wrote about it, and Man Ray photographed it, and the images survive as a record of a body caught between two readings. Moralioglu used those photographs as his source, and the collection carried their doubleness into cloth.
Two readings
The tension ran through every look. Lingerie and feathers on one side, sharp tailoring on the other, often on the same body. A structured coat opened onto something sheer. Menswear shapes arrived cut for a woman, then softened with embellishment that caught the light. The clothes refused to settle on a single gender, which was the point of choosing Barbette in the first place.
Moralioglu is an archivist by instinct, and he reads the past for the people it overlooked. Barbette suits that habit. Here was a performer who built a career on ambiguity a century before fashion made a slogan of it. The collection treated that history as material rather than costume, and the tailoring kept it from tipping into pastiche.
The craft was the argument. Beading, embroidery and hand-applied feather work sat against tweed and coating, and the contrast is what the Erdem studio does better than most. Fragile surfaces need a firm structure to hang on, and the performer's costumes gave him a reason to put the two side by side.
A trapeze act is a body pretending to be weightless. Moralioglu dressed the pretence and kept the weight.
The Splendid EditLondon theatre
The staging leaned into spectacle. Moralioglu tends to build a world rather than a runway, and Barbette handed him a ready-made one, all footlights and feathers and the hush before a wire act. The collection read as theatrical without losing the discipline that keeps his clothes wearable off the stage.
London reviewers put the show near the top of the week. It arrived on a schedule crowded with returns and debuts, and it held its own by doing the thing Erdem has always done, which is to find a story and dress it completely. The house has grown into one of the surer names on the London calendar, and Sunday confirmed the standing.
Moralioglu keeps proving that research can carry a collection when the hand behind it is this precise. Barbette gave him a subject who lived between categories, and he answered with clothes that do the same. The week closes on Monday. This was one of the shows people will still be talking about when it does.
Erdem showed Spring 2027 on Sunday during London Fashion Week. Courtesy of Fashion PR Firm