The idea of ‘masculine-feminine’ has been deployed ever since Yves Saint Laurent introduced tuxedos for women in 1966—but it’s taken till now for designers to start putting the L into LGBTQIA+ as far as visibility in fashion collections is concerned. In London, S.S. Daley started Fashion Week with his collection about the artist Gluck and Constance Spry, and Erdem’s spring offering was sketched around his research into the lives of the dandified novelist Radclyffe Hall and the sculptor Una, Lady Troubridge, who mostly wore pretty dresses
“Radclyffe was most famous for writing The Well of Loneliness, which has become a kind of queer, lesbian bible of sorts,” Erdem Moralioglu related after his collection of distinctly contrasting trouser suits and arrays of drop-waisted dress silhouettes had walked the steps and courtyard of the British Museum.
The title page of the The Well of Loneliness was printed on cavas and sewn as a badge of honor to the cuff of every suit—with a monocle pinned to each of the lapels. The novel was notoriously banned by the British government in 1928 for its portrayal of a female character called Stephen and her lover Mary. “Radclyffe was born Marguerite, and went by the name of John,” said Moralioglu. “What I was most interested in was how intensely she was masculine, and how feminine Una was.”
He went to the Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton to get the fit of the collections’ suits correct—the results strode out in everything from pinstripes to a singularly excellent black dinner jacket. Still, Moralioglu wasn’t sticking literally to the vintage visuals. The extremely delicate dresses were gorgeous in period shades of eau-de-nil, peach and silver tissue lamé, and then many more abstract confections in deeper greens and shocking pink.
Moralioglu’s repertoire extended to denim—in pale mint it treated some of his extraordinarily bedazzling sparkling crystal embroideries. Backstage, the designer was wearing a T-shirt printed with a green carnation—a secret symbol of homosexuality from Oscar Wilde’s time. He pointed out that it was being sold as part of his support for akt, the only UK charity providing support for homeless LGBTQIA+ 16-25 year olds, and Not A Phase, a trans-led grassroots charity. The persecution and suppression of queer people a hundred years ago might seem like far off history, but, Moralioglu reminded his audience, it still persists in pernicious ways today.
