Erdem Moralioglu: “I’ve Always Been Attracted to Things with a Human Hand”

TRANSCRIPT

Erdem Moralioglu: I’ve always been attracted to things that have a very human hand. And I think whether it’s in how the dress has been made or what it’s been made out of or the shape, it’s that idea of a humanness hopefully to how that person feels when they’re wearing it, they feel like they’re the only person who has that piece.

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour to the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well-lived life. And welcome to the 12th season finale of The Grand Tourist. We’ll be back in May with new episodes and keep your eyes peeled for a special announcement before season 13 begins. So make sure you’re staying up to date by signing up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net, or at the link in my bio on Instagram.

In 2025, the fashion world has been rocked by a revolving door of high profile designers going from one legendary house to another. The ongoing headlines have made me appreciate the days of fashion that solidified my generation’s worldview, especially in New York, with the likes of Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren. Staying independent today with your own fashion label year after year, season after season could be quite the daunting task. Some say it’s damn near impossible. That’s why I’m so excited to speak with my guest today, a womenswear designer who has maintained his own label and quite the fan base for nearly 20 years, Erdem Moralioglu.

The Canadian native studied in London where he lives and works today. His womenswear is many things, sophisticated, feminine, delicate, and often inspired by the designer’s own intense research and inventive narratives. His collections have garnered him numerous awards, including the 2010 inaugural British Fashion Council Vogue Designer Fashion Fund award, and he received an MBE from the Queen in 2020. Speaking of narratives, for his spring summer 2025 collection he was inspired by the classic novel, The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, and its ideas of blurring the lines between the masculine and the feminine exemplified in his lines, tailoring, and silhouettes. More on that later.

He’s a real designer’s designer, and luckily for me, as you’ll hear, he’s a charming soul, if there ever was one. I caught up with Erdem from his studio in London to discuss his early life and his obsessions with women as a young man, why he moved to London to pursue his dreams, why he has a quirky collection of busts, his plans for the future, and more.

We’re almost the same age, I think probably a little bit older, but I was wondering what your earliest memory of life was in Montreal as a child in the 80s.

Gosh. My earliest memory of childhood is probably the lake. I grew up in a little yellow stucco bungalow in the suburbs of Montreal. My earliest memory would be the big lake at the end of our street. It was called Lac-Saint-Louis. I remember being on my BMX and riding around the edge of the lake. That lake, it felt so big when I was a child. It just was like this big expanse of water. That’s my earliest memory.

And what kind of child were you? What did your teachers during those teacher evaluations tell your parents?

That’s a good question. I was very shy as a child. I definitely liked to play by myself. And I drew, so I was often in my own world. I loved going to the library. I was a geeky, strange child. I read lots. I drew and hid in my own world.

And what did you draw? Could you draw from an early age that we would recognize today or was it a totally different kind of kid’s drawing?

I could draw from quite a young age, and I generally drew women. I was obsessed with women. I was obsessed with how women looked, how they walked. I was interested in my mom, her clothes, her makeup, her friends, how they spoke to each other, how they sat. Would often my mom would have coffee with her friends and I was fascinated by the female. I also grew up with a twin, I have a twin sister, and so the the idea of having someone who’s a part of you, but in so many ways the opposite, but also… There’s something very interesting I think when your twin is the opposite sex. It’s interesting.

Did your twin sister pursue a creative career also?

She did. She does. She works in film. She’s a director and a producer in documentary film.

Oh, amazing. And so your father was Turkish, right? And your mother was English?

Yes.

Did you feel any sense of growing up differently in home than some of your friends did? I’m not sure how, if your father was Turkish when he came to Canada or how many years he was there versus from where he was from?

They emigrated to Canada when they were quite late. They were quite old. They were in their late thirties. It was interesting. Growing up in the suburbs of Canada, I was surrounded by a lot of people named Brian or Kelly, and I, of course, had a very distinct Turkish name. I also grew up with parents, my mom had a British accent, my father had a Turkish accent. It was an interesting childhood of contrast. Both of my parents come from two very different places, two different cultures, two different religions, two very different upbringings. My father came from a very big family, he was the youngest. My mom came from a smaller family, she was the eldest. Yeah, I always grew up with the sense that my parents were living somewhere where neither of them really belonged in a way, if that makes sense. I always felt like ultimately they would probably both want to go back to their respective birthplace.

You also spent time I heard in Birmingham growing up. Is that true?

We spent a lot of time in Birmingham and in Turkey. Growing up we would visit our grandparents in the UK and then visit our grandparents in Turkey. And that, just even in that being this suburban kid from Canada to experience, I don’t know, going to the Tower of London and then suddenly you’d be in a bazaar in Istanbul. That kind of visual food and contrast was really amazing. Of course, I didn’t realize it at the time, it was just life and it was the process of visiting the family. It was an amazing way to grow up. But also at the same time, you grew up really with just your parents and my sister. So we were a really small family unit. Everyone else was far away, so everything seemed to be happening far away.

I was actually fascinated that by you mentioned in an interview that you love this Canadian TV show called Fashion File.

Yes.

Which I have heard about referenced, but for us in the US, we’ve never seen it. How do you describe that show? And I love those… For me, I didn’t have Fashion File, but I had CNN style with Elsa Klensch-

Elsa Klensch.

Who was my one little portal into that universe that I love so much. So tell me about Fashion File and why you loved it.

Oh my gosh. Fashion File, which is so interesting, because Tim Blanks was the host and I’ve gone on to become great friends with Tim. Tim’s amazing. And he’s also, of course, the most extraordinary writer, critic. He’s such a part of… He was even at our wedding. He’s a part of my life, but I grew up watching Tim Blanks on television. And he would report on fashion shows much like… Of course, Elsa Klensch was reporting on fashion, but Tim’s approach was very different to Elsa Klensch. I think Elsa Klensch, it’s dealing with fashion with kid gloves. It’s a different approach, a formal approach to fashion.

But strangely, growing up in Montreal, you had Fashion File with Tim Blanks. You had FashionTV with Jeannie Beker. You also had a show on the French-Canadian equivalent of MTV that was called… The channel was called MusiquePlus. And you had a fashion show, a show about fashion called Perfecto. It was hosted by Stéphane Le Duc. Amazing. And we also had the channels from France who would… So you had Channel 5 and what’s so amazing about France, they report on the shows, on the fashion shows in the news.

You could access. As a 10-year-old, I could… 10, 11, 12, I was able to see those amazing Gautier collections or those early Yohji collections, trees, everything. It was food that you were constantly being fed in this other world. So even though I was very, very young and maybe the only thing that we had or only relationship we had to fashion was like Holt Renfrew, which was a department store, aside from that, actually television just was amazing. It allowed you to study it.

I recently went to… There was this wonderful full circle moment. I grew up, of course, the supermodels as they entered pop culture. That was something that was so important to a 12, 13, 14-year-old me. I recently gave an award to Linda Evangelista at the Canadian Fashion Awards for her contribution to fashion, which is extraordinary.

So you studied fashion in Toronto before getting your master’s at RCA in London. And so tell me about that decision and why London? Why were you like, “I got to get out of here, Montreal is not for me,” or you’re just like, “I want to hit the big time”? What was that experience like for you going to… Why RCA and what happened there?

I think in the back of my head, there was always a plan. I always knew that I was going to leave Canada. I always knew that if I wanted to become a designer, that I would have to leave. Also, because my mother being British, I had a passport. So I knew there was a possibility that I would be able to maybe figure it out. And in my third year in Toronto, I did an apprenticeship with Vivienne Westwood. And that was a real seminal moment. While I was doing this, I did an exchange program. Funnily enough, the exchange program was at University of Central England, which doesn’t exist anymore. And that was in Birmingham.

My mom, I remember telling my mom, I was like, “I’ve got a place in the University of Central England.” And she was like, “I’ve worked so hard to leave Birmingham, and now you are effectively going back.” She did appreciate it. And there were some amazing teachers there. I love Vivienne Westwood. I grew up loving Vivienne Westwood and all of those amazing collections, Storm in a Teacup, et cetera. And when I was there, you had two groups of students. You had one group of students that were from Saint Martins, or you had the other group that were from the Royal College of Art. And so it was there that I understood you either had to go to Saint Martins or the Royal College, and those were the two main places to go to. And if you went to either of them, that was good.

And I worked in the atelier. And then most importantly, I worked in the archive. So going through and sorting out old collections, which was, you can imagine was corsets made by Mr. Pearl or the platforms that Naomi Campbell fell in. All of these extraordinary… The bustle that Eva Herzigová wore covered in crystals. It was all of these extraordinary iconic outfits. But there was probably where the seed was officially planted in my third year. I went back to Toronto, I finished my BA, I applied. Saint Martins was the UCAS system, and I had missed the deadline. So I only applied to the Royal College by default. And I managed to get an interview.

And then I think I had a little bit of a student loan and got myself a ticket to London, did the interview, and then had to figure out how to… And then I got in, which was amazing. I was in a class of about 10. And then figuring out how to pay for it and had to work backwards and figure it out. And so it all began really… Once I went to the Royal College, that was… I was living in London, and suddenly everything changed.

What did London mean to you at the time?

It was like London was this big amazing city of discovery. It was like you had the best-

What year was this about?

This is 2001 to 2003. So you had-

Okay, so this is like go-go, boom London time, right?

Yeah. Wednesday night you had Nag Nag Nag. That was this amazing queer night you would go and you might see Bjork on the dance floor, or it was like Wolfgang Tillmans. You’d have pop stars on Friday at Scala. You’d go to Heaven on Monday. These are all the places you’d go out to, but me and all of my friends, we would just go out. It was all about going out, figuring out where you were going to go, how you’re going to buy as many drinks as possible and what you’re going to wear.

Of course, college was amazing. It was such a different approach to maybe a North American system where you had classes and a schedule. So you would be in art history from 11:00 till 1:00 and then life drawing from 1:00 till et cetera. Whereas at the Royal College, there was no schedule. You really had to make… You filled your day with research, inspiration, working with tutors, one-on-one discussions, and crits. It was a very open way of working. We had tutors like Albert [inaudible 00:17:10]. He did a project about designing for a specific character. So the idea of designing with a character in mind was something I really discovered at the Royal College. It wasn’t something I’d understood really previously.

It was this time of real discovery. Also, there was a textile department. You became friends with people that were doing a master’s in printing or embroidery or weaving. You could do your master’s in weaving to… I’d never really seen proper loom before. And then to just have all of these resources there. People studying millinery. It was this very open, exploratory time. It was a really difficult time. It was challenging. My father died when I was at the Royal College, so there’s a lot of life things happening at the same time. But it was there that I understood I was exactly where I needed to be, and that was a great feeling to have at such a young age.

What did you aspire to in your studies or right after your studies? What were you like, “I’m going to be,” whatever that was? What was your fantasy at the time?

My fantasy was to work for a house in Paris. The idea was I would work for a house in Paris, and then I would start my own label.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

So you struck out on your own early compared to others, I’m sure, and I’m sure there must have been, someone said like, “Why?” When do you take that leap? What pushed you to take that leap? Why didn’t you go to Paris? Or did you attempt it and then just go… What led you to make that decision you’re just going to do things on your own early. What was that decision like?

It’s interesting. I graduated, I lived in New York. I got a job in New York, which I was an assistant, assistant, assistant. I hadn’t found my feet. And there was something about going to New York that almost felt like I was going backwards in a weird way, whereas I so desperately wanted to stay in Europe. I had met by that point the person I would marry and who I’m married to, Philip, an architect who was studying architecture. When I moved back to London, I did interviews. I did so many interviews. It was the summer of 20 job interviews. It didn’t happen.

And I ended up doing this competition to update my portfolio and I won it. And that gave me a studio for two years, a little small amount of money to use a press agency. It gave me a small amount of budget towards an accountant. And I had this little tiny 200-square foot room, a pattern cutting table, a sewing machine, and then a communal fax machine that we had to share in the days. I’m aging myself, but anyways.

That’s okay.

Because you had to. Weirdly, Italian mills, French mills, if you were making a fabric order, it was all by fax. Everything was like you do fax. And so I won the competition. I made a really small collection, and then I did my first full runway show in fall 2006, and that I showed at the V&A. Very small, I couldn’t afford shoes. So I bought these awful bridesmaids shoes that Philip helped me spray paint black. I showed the collection and that collection then I ended up selling to Barneys who became my first client. So I sold that to someone named Julie Gilhart and Judy Collinson. And that really, if I have to choose a little moment where maybe my career began was suddenly when I was being sold in Barneys on Madison and in Beverly Hills.

Wow. And to the younger listeners, Barneys was a store in New York. Sad I have to say that now. Barneys was a very important store. And so your first studio space I read was in Shoreditch, right? And then-

Yes. At Hackney.

Okay.

I was in Hackney-

Because that neighborhood I don’t think was as cool as it is now and all… Now, Shoreditch has the Ace Hotel, and there’s Soho House, and there’s some sort of Shoreditch [inaudible 00:23:52] and all. Was it a rougher area when you were working there at the time?

It was definitely rougher, and then evolved into somewhere really amazing. There was an amazing energy there in Hackney. And then we would end up living there for a very, very, very long time. We still actually have a house in Hackney, but we live in Bloomsbury, which is more really in the middle of London. But it was amazing. It was amazing, those early collections. I went back to the Royal College and worked with seamstresses that had helped me sew my graduate collection. You just made up the rules as you went along. There was something very interesting. Once I was in Barneys, then suddenly I was in Harvey Nichols or at…

Another store that changed a lot of things for me was a store called Colette in Paris, which was a very… You could almost say like a precursor to Dover Street, a very conceptual, amazing retail space. I came from it not really from a press side, but rather almost from a client side, creating collections and working with really amazing partners, doing trunk shows, zipping customers into dresses. And that’s really how I began.

And tell me about that first collection. Describe it to a blind person, how would you describe that first collection and that sold to Barneys, and what did people react well about it? What clicked in people’s minds?

It was mostly made of overstock fabrics. I became friends with someone who was a fabric agent, and he happened to have lots of overstock, beautiful tailoring fabrics, and offcuts. So I was able to buy smaller amounts and just these beautiful fabrics that I would normally never be able to afford. I was never a printer, but I always imagined the fabrics that I wanted to use. So I started digitally printing fabrics and just because I knew what I wanted something to look like, and I’d create it on my laptop quite badly and crudely.

And I remember we were living in this shared house, and I think one of my roommate’s friends came home with a book on ornithology, that they’d found in a skip, which is the garbage basically. And it was this beautiful Victorian book of [inaudible 00:27:10]. The images in the book were amazing, and it was a very old book. And I scanned them, manipulated them, used them. It was a combination of birds, overstock tailoring, and worked with these amazing older ladies that were amazing hand knitters or beautiful hand knits and Scottish tweeds that were made. It was a lot of beg, borrowing, and stealing, but it culminated in this very English collection. It looked very English. And all of it was made in London actually.

And that was as a result, that was because I just didn’t know how else to make things. I had to be able to go to the factories myself. I had to talk and work with the graders myself. It was something that at the beginning was something where you had to be aware of every single stage and step.

That collection received a lot of acclaim, and in those first five or so years-

Ish, actually.

Your career, yeah.

Ish, ish. Tepid, I would say.

Okay. You’re still here today, so something must have worked. So with a growing label in those early days, what was your biggest challenge? Do you think you could do it today instead of graduating when you did, you did it in 2020?

Oh my gosh.

What was tough about it and could you do it today?

There are so different aspects of it that were challenging. I think the hardest thing was, which is I think a challenge for any designer is you can have a very beautiful collection, you can sell it very well, but then to be able to take that collection, produce it, deliver it, and then to actually be able to go through the full cycle of making and delivering a collection is a very different thing. That also requires a certain amount of finance actually. So to actually do the full cycle is something that people never really talk about. Certainly when you’re a fashion student, it’s like you… I always just thought it miraculously all happened, which is not the case, which I discovered. So you had challenges like that.

I remember even… Also aside from the challenge of being someone who is not very well-known and that kind of… There is a skepticism that you receive either from buyers or from the press when you’re new. Yeah, gosh, there were so many different challenges. Even I remember one of my first orders was stolen and it was going to Barneys. You had a form of insurance that covered you from the port to America. The van had been robbed on the way to the port. I think I was insured for the cubic value of what was in the van, which was amounted to… I think I got like 30 pounds, but the value of the order was like 20,000 pounds or something. It was things like that that happened early on where… Oh my gosh, there were lots of challenges.

Also, at that time when I just began, my mom passed away. So then my parents passed away in quite close succession. Just under four years between both of them. So I was in my 20s, and then suddenly this small family unit, half of everyone was gone. That also, that kind of feeling of starting this world and then also not that kind of grounding that everyone’s parents gives you was gone. The challenges came from lots of different directions.

(SPONSOR BREAK)

And do you have a personal creative process you go through when you’re conceiving of a collection? When you first sit down to go, “Okay, spring summer 2025.”

Yep.

What is that? What do you do personally? How do you start that process?

I have a very defined process. I go to the library, I go to London Library every Tuesday where I research, so it’s the oldest lending library in London. Virginia Woolf was a member, E. M. Forrester, Edith Sitwell. It’s an amazing place. There’s something in the walls of that place that is very special. And I sit there and I draw. If I can’t think of something, I look at books, I research. I even sometimes work with a librarian that works there to help me research an idea. I often will have a few ideas in my head of where I want to go for particular season. Some of those ideas work out, some of them don’t, some of them I keep for the future. So for example, the last collection was about Radclyffe Hall and a book called The Well of Loneliness, which is a bible of sorts.

When did you first read that book?

I had read it many years ago and then recently reread it. And it was always something that I knew I wanted to come back to in the story of Radclyffe and Una, who is her life partner, and this idea of gender and identity, and if Radclyffe was alive today, would they be they/them, or… This question of gender I thought was very, very interesting. It’s a fascinating story, and her story is fascinating, and the story of the book itself is fascinating, how it was banned, et cetera. So I knew that I would eventually do something on that book, but for whatever reason, spring summer, and that idea of working with a Savile Row tailor and all of those things aligned with this idea of something that felt very masculine or very feminine. It came alive. It’s like making almost a little film. There’s a lot of different moving parts that go into a collection, and the timing of where you go is dependent on so many different things.

And so let’s maybe go one collection in the past, was there a different inspiration that had that kind of [inaudible 00:35:47] if you give another example of this narrative that fuels your creativity?

Yeah. So for example, fall-winter was inspired by Maria Callas, which is definitely there’s been many collections exploring her life. But I was particularly interested in a performance that she did at the Scala in 1953. It was an opera based on the story of Medea. There was something about her particular Greek-ness, and I knew… Of course, I was showing in the British Museum and the opportunity of maybe doing something with the Parthenon marbles. Medea was written around the same time that the Parthenon was built and the story of Callas being American, born in New York, dying in Paris, but having her remains returned to Greece, this idea of returning something, circularity, or where people end up or things end up aren’t necessarily where they’re from, and it was looking at her Greek-ness.

And so that was a research process that went into really looking at theater production from that time, what she wore, the idea of being dressed, undressed on stage, off stage, and the story of Medea, and the parallels between that Greek tragedy and her life as well that was fascinating.

And how did that translate into your actual designs?

There were some literal translations. Some of her costumes from that particular production were amazing. There were these very crude outlines of Grecian costumes, but painted in a very flat way on the front of her dress. So she had this controlled 1950s silhouette, but it was just very crudely painted with a paintbrush. That idea of creating these very perfectly-fitted controlled garments and then just taking a paintbrush and doing something that felt almost like you were desecrating something that was perfect felt very interesting. So that was one aspect. I definitely think there was this idea of the on, offstage images of her in her… With marabou and dressing gowns and half in costume, half not in costume, wig tape. All of those things were clues into creating the little puzzle pieces of the collection.

And you’re quite known for your prints, and where does that come from? And obviously we’ve been talking about how, in the early days, you took those scans and you moved them on the computer. Why do you these prints speak to you? Does it overlap with other loves of yours? Do you love painting? Do you love graphic design? Trying to find maybe the source code of the love of prints and your aptitude for them clearly comes together.

That’s also a good question. I think it comes from… You can almost imagine exactly what you want and what you need for a particular collection. So you then create it in a way. So it’s creating something that you need in a way to either say something with the collection. I also think there’s something very interesting about creating a cloth or a textile that sits in between something that feels like, is that new? Is that old? Is that familiar? Is that not familiar? That rub of something that almost confuses the eye I find very, very interesting. And also maybe you can create an artwork that has tiny clues or secrets in it.

For example, the Callus collection. I was looking at these amazing set designs from the 1950s, and when we started applying these very strange scales on garments, we could see that actually it created something very interesting, like something being projected onto the back of a stage or being projected onto a dress, felt like it helped tell the story. And it also, through abstraction, looked quite modern. So yeah, print is an extension of the storytelling maybe if I had to break it down in a really simple way. And I think I’ve always been fascinated by tools that help say something.

I want to ask you how you stay inspired, but I’m also fascinated by your collection of busts that I think T Magazine did a story somewhat recently about them. How did that start?

With the busts I think I go through these strange cyclical phases of looking at specific objects and collecting them quite obsessively. And busts are one of them that fall into that category.

And most of them are heads, they’re not full Mozart like head and shoulders and upper torso kind of busts. They’re like feminine, more almost Brâncuși like heads, right?

There’s a few shoulders in there. There’s some shoulders, but you are right on that kind of elongated. There are certain artist that I’m attracted to and go back to in the beginning of the century. And even English sculptors, people like Frank Dobson I find really amazing.

How many busts do you think you have or heads or however we want to call them? How many do you own.

Last count I think we’re at 27. I think we’re just under 30.

Is your partner also a compulsive collector? Is he like, “Yay, more busts” or is he like the-

No, he is an eye rolling, very worried about where we’re going to put all of this stuff. Philip, he has amazing taste, and is. He’s much more minimal.

And last year you had a collection that was inspired by the Duchess of Devonshire, who is a icon in different ways, the late icon. You had an exhibit at Chatsworth House that was part of an imagined conversation between the two of you, which I found really fascinating from like a art history, curatorial performance, everything rolled into one. Tell me a little bit about that.

It was an amazing opportunity. And the first time I had ever co-curated an exhibit that was at Chatsworth House, which is a large, extraordinary, beautiful house in the middle of Derbyshire. It’s like the British equivalent of Versailles. It’s a huge, very important historic house and building. Duchess Deborah married into the family. She was originally one of the Mitford sisters. She was the youngest of the Mitford sisters. And of course, they have their own extraordinary history. And her story and this idea of continuing something I found so beautifully inspiring. Her and her husband Andrew were never really supposed to inherit the house, the house was supposed to be taken on by Andrew’s two older brothers, but both of them died in the war.

And so they ended up inheriting this huge house. There were extraordinary inheritance taxes, and they had to save the house. And there were so many different elements that went into saving the house, and she definitely played a part in saving it. And that story I found really inspiring as well as the history of the house. There are these extraordinary 14th century tapestries that they sold to the nation in order to pay their death duties. So that made a strange appearance in the collection. She was also a huge fan of Elvis, that also made a huge… It played a big part in the collection looking at embroideries that he wore when he was on tour in Hawaii and looking at couture dresses that she had from the 1950s, the weird how they both spoke to each other, this idea of ornamentation. So it was an interesting collection to get our teeth into. She was so fascinating.

And the family were amazingly generous. Even we were able to create things out of textiles that belonged to her, things that were in her bedroom, and she was extraordinary. I also knew the late Stella Tennant, who’s an amazing model, but also an amazing supporter of Scottish textiles, and spent time with her going up to Scotland to look at different tweedmills. And Debo was her grandmother. I then met Stella’s young daughter at the time named Cecily, and she would go on to do an apprenticeship with us. She did this beautiful embroidery on the finale dress into one of Debo’s old curtains. So the dress was this deconstructed thing, and it was this wonderful full circle moment of Debo’s great-granddaughter embroidering something. So it was this idea of lineage and inheritance. The idea of family and circularity I thought was so interesting.

By the time this comes out, it’ll be in the next season, which will be in early 2025. So do you have any holiday plans? What is your winter like? What do you like to do during those months?

We live in a very old house, as I said, in Bloomsbury. So we’re near the British Museum, and it’s an old Georgian house, which really lends itself to Christmas well. We love cooking together and having friends over or family. There’s lots of Turkey and having friends coming and going. It’s a really lovely time. We stay put. Also, Philip is from a very, very big family, and they’re all mostly in London, so we spend a lot of time with the in-laws as well. No, it’s a great time of year.

And what’s next for you? In terms of work-wise, where are you in your cycle at the moment, in terms of collections and all of that?

So at the moment working on pre-fall, which we’re going to shoot the week after next, and the next fall-winter collection, which we’ll show in February. And then all gearing up really for the 20-year anniversary, which will be fall 2026.

Oh gosh. And are you thinking about doing something special for it? Are you like an anniversary person where you think this is like, “Oh, I got to…” Or is it making you nostalgic or thinking strategically or having big thoughts kind of of thing?

All of the above and also just excited to keep going. I’m excited about the next collection. There’s some exciting projects that we’re working on. We’re working on a book, which is something that we’ve never done, and hopefully another exhibit. So there’s definitely some exciting projects happening in the future.

Amazing. And as I ask a lot of my guests, if you had to describe yourself in three words, what would those three words be?

Curious. Bookish. Can I say bookish?

Yeah, why not?

Why not? And … a dreamer.

Thank you to my guest, Erdem Moralioglu, and to his entire team for making this episode happen. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, The Grand Tourist Curator at thegrandtourist.net. And follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen, and leave us a rating or comment. Every little bit helps. Til next season!

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