Lynn Yaeger Meets Her Collecting Match in Erdem Moralioglu

By Lynn Yaeger
April 13, 2010

“So are you loving that chartreuse glass thing you bought at the flea market in Marche St. Honore?” I ask the young British fashion designer Erdem Moralioglu, when I reach him by phone in London. He laughs, recalling the French dealer hawking this particular object: “It’s like a large bonbon jar. It was one in a million, remember? A very rare, amazing find!”

I first met Moralioglu (a master of the refined, flower-printed frock who has just won the prestigious British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund prize), when I interviewed him this past February during London Fashion Week, and our freewheeling conversation somehow landed on the subject of collecting. (Was it my vintage 1940s reindeer sweater that prompted the discussion?) I found out in short order that 1) Moralioglu goes regularly to the monthly dealers’ market at the Kempton racetrack, which he describes as “hardcore” since it requires leaving London at 5 am because the whole thing closes up by noon. (I went to this once, and if you decide to go—bring cash! The ATM didn’t take my card, which almost cost me the Norah Welling South Sea Island doll I had my eye on.) And 2) He was going to be in Paris the same time as I was and was dying to do a little flea marketing together.

Now that I've returned to New York and Erdem is back in England, I've called him to ask him reflect on his collecting style. “I’m not a collector; I’m more of a hoarder. I go on kicks,” Moralioglu explains. “You want the complete set—it’s an insatiable kind of thing.” Though he insists that his interests lie mostly in printed matter—“I’m bookish and paperish”—how does that explain the chartreuse glass jar, and the hours we spent in the freezing cold bargaining for it a few weeks ago? And what about the two half-naked art deco bathing beauty figurines he bought at the Vanvas market in Paris, where he told me gleefully that he had license to buy anything, no matter how large, since he was showing his collection in France and would be trucking it all back to London anyway?

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Erdem Fall/Winter 2010
Photo Credit: Except when noted, photos provided by Erdem.
Ashley Olsen; Thandie Newton
Erdem Fall/Winter 2010
Keira Knightley in Erdem (Photo by Ferdaus Shamim/WireImage); Jessica Stam

Moralioglu may have shown some restraint during our Paris escapade (he did not end up schlepping home an armoire or a copper bathtub, though he did indulge his penchant for paper ephemera, snapping up a copy of a turn of the century magazine called Belle Époque) but he has hardly slowed down in the intervening weeks. When I ask what he has been up to lately, he says that he recently became obsessed with the 1970s male style guides by Charles Hix, and that, true to his collecting style, he has gone on eBay and amassed a whole roster of these tomes—works with titles like Looking Good and Man Alive.

So this Hix guy is what you’re into now? “Oh, no, I’m over him, completely over him. I’ve moved on to [photographers] Bruce Weber and Duane Michals. I just bought a Weber book on eBay, but I don’t have it yet—I’m having it sent to my friend in Williamsburg, since I’ll be in New York in a few weeks.”

Moralioglu is nothing if not consistently resourceful when it comes to getting his finds home. “The best things I ever found on eBay were these Robin Day molded plastic ‘60s chairs—amazingly beautiful! I bought four of them for like nothing, but then I had to hire a van to get them down [to London] from Wales.”

Though Moralioglu's design studio is mostly decorated with this style of industrial furniture from the ‘60s and ‘70s—much of it found at the Kempton market in the UK—there is also room for a bit of Victoriana, namely a diorama, roughly two by three feet, of a taxidermy bat eating a pheasant. “There’s red dripping from its teeth! A vegetarian in my office wants it thrown out, but I refuse to remove it,” he says.

We arrange to spend a day exploring Manhattan’s sadly dwindling roster of antique markets when he’s in town in late May. He tells me he’ll be searching for vintage family albums. “I bought a German album with all these photos and cut-outs, and another album of a sailing family from the 1920s. And then I bought an auction lot made up of old family photos, just random persons from the turn of the century to the 1920s. They’re faded out around the edges, with free-floating faces in the middle. They’re amazing and inspiring!”

Well, Moralioglu is certainly all over the place—bonbon jars, plastic chairs, bathing beauties, photo albums, dead bats? When I ask if there is a connective tissue running through these disparate if heart-felt collections, he thinks for a moment. “They’re food for the brain… brain food! They’re just the things that are going to make the penny drop.