At a Camden concert venue full of dry ice and crystal-studded bodysuits, Erdem Moralıoğlu staged the masculine-feminine argument and actually won it
The Roadhouse in Camden is a concert hall – not a gallery, not a garden, not a converted industrial space serving its third season in a row. It has a pit. It has a stage. Models moved through dry ice that drifted low across the floor, wearing crystal-studded bodysuits and soigné tailoring, and the whole effect felt less like a runway presentation and more like the third act of something that had been building.
The question is whether Erdem Moralıoğlu had earned that staging, and the answer was yes. The collection’s inspiration – a female impersonator and trapeze artist from the 1920s – gave him a frame for the masculine-feminine push-pull he’s visited before, but the specificity of the reference tightened the argument. The muse in question was Barbette, the Texas-born performer who made a career of appearing on European stages as a woman, became a darling of Jean Cocteau and Man Ray, and made theatrical ambiguity look less like a stunt than a discipline. Moralıoğlu pulled discipline from that, too.
The clothes worked by collision, not compromise. High-collared Edwardian shirts worn with showgirl feathers. Jaunty tuxedo jackets over boudoir lingerie. Mannish woolen coats in the same lineup as sparkly panties. Neither register apologized to the other, and that refusal to soften was the collection’s real argument. The masculine pieces were cut with a tailoring confidence – nothing here was doing the winking, ironic version of a tuxedo jacket – and the more overtly theatrical garments, the crystal-studded bodysuits and the lingerie silhouettes, landed as garments rather than costumes.
Womenswear has spent years in this conversation, and the masculine-feminine juxtaposition can run on autopilot. What saved it here was the specificity of the muse – Barbette’s particular story, the actual history of performing gender as performance – and the willingness to stage the collection in a venue that committed to that theatricality rather than working against it. The dry ice could have been a bit much. It wasn’t.
The woolen coats are the practical question the collection leaves open. They are the strongest case for Erdem’s tailoring, but they are also the items furthest from the lingerie and the feathers, and whether the customer follows the designer all the way to that end of the spectrum is the kind of answer that shows up in sell-through rather than on a runway. The show itself didn’t need to answer it. It had other, more interesting things to say.
See the complete collection below:
Images courtesy of Erdem
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