Saturday at LFW: Erdem and Richard Quinn

A dank wet Saturday at London Fashion Week, where ironically in a ready-to-wear season the most distinctive collections were essentially expressions of couture.
 

Erdem: Maria Callas among the Elgin Marbles

 
Medea, Maria Callas and the sense of loss both heroines suffered from was the connective tissue in the latest opulently impressive collection by Erdem Moralioglu.

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Staged with grandeur inside the British Museum, the collection echoed multiple intimate moments in Callas’ daily live. Models walking with hair clips, wig tape and multiple shawls suggesting a rushed moment to prepare backstage after an epic performance by the diva. A cast often finished with heavy eye make, and sometimes still dressed in pajamas, as if backstage awaiting an admirer to appear.
 
Opening with a huge shawl collar coat, thrown on veteran supermodel Guinevere van Seenus and worn with fully exposed bra.

Erdem, like Maria, was always a fan of marabou feathers – featuring them as trim on some femme fatale-worthy slippers, or colored psychedelically  on some over the top coats. 
 
A sense of the very tasteful thrown together that included ruched and scrunched up Donegal tweed herringbone coats and a double-breasted mess jacket with lapels that wear wider than the model’s torso.
 
For evening, Erdem showed mega-large floral print cocktails, flared 50s style and dissected with grosgrain ribbons. Moralioglu revealed that he was particularly inspired by a 1953 production of the opera Medea, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
 
“There were so many interesting parallels between the life of Medea and that of Maria,” expounded the designer. 
 
Medea, a play written by Euripides in 431 BC, is a woman who falls in love, sacrifices everything, and ends up killing her brother and children. Callas was born in New York and moved to Europe going on to lead a nomadic life where she was in a sense controlled by her own talents, and then gave that up for a disappointing love.
 
Hence, the most beautiful dresses were the crushed silk narrow looks, finished with mini capes and overprinted with silhouettes of opera heroines.
 
All building to a climax, when a live singer who performed with gusto ‘La Wally’, famed for it being sung in 1980s cult film ‘Diva’ by Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez.
 
In some remarkably quick staging techniques, the production team installed all the seating, sound decks and lights for this show in just 30 minutes inside the museum, a legendary destination permanently packed with art lovers.
 
Post-show, Moralioglu noted that the New York-born Callas was eventually reunited with Greece, when her ashes returned to her ancestors’ home. 
 
And, in a sense, he also returned Callas to her roots as well. The show was staged inside Room 18 of the British Museum, the location of the Elgin Marbles. These extraordinary marble sculptures taken from the Parthenon in Athens, are still the subject of a bitter row between Greece and Britain. They should be returned to the land of their birth, as Callas was poetically today by Erdem.
 

Richard Quinn: Rarefied elegance

Haute couture at Richard Quinn, and not pointless hype, from the most original fabric innovator in UK fashion today.

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A sense of rarefied elegance that echoed the 1950s salon shows and yet felt very right for today, presented in a revamped Victoria ballroom.
 
Few designers – actually make that couturiers, which is what Quinn is – are as uncompromising as Richard, who develops all his own materials and cuts with grandeur and gallantry.
 
He really has great couture design chops: frosted sequined columns and snowy-beaded dresses nipped at the waist were technically perfect and great examples of classic with a twist. While his Audrey Hepburn-worthy black velvet columns and baby doll dresses were sensational too. Like many looks finished with dramatic ruffled taffeta necklines. Climaxing with a remarkable series on wedding gowns, including a triple series of dimpled cocoon looks that deserved standing ovations.
 
In a very real sense, Richard Quinn is the classiest act in London fashion, without ever being remotely uptight. His shows are elegant expressions of joie de vivre, just like this one which featured a string quartet backing up Welsh singer Hannah Grace in great performances of classic American tracks like ‘Both Sides Now’ and ‘I Want To Be With You Everywhere’.
 
All dressed in bold floral prints, part of a run of 900 meters that were also used as giant curtains inside the ballroom of the Andaz Hotel where this show as staged. Fabrics that will now be sold on to a fabric firm, reinforcing the idea of clothes being passed from one generation to the next.
 
“Clothes exist to be cherished, passed down form mother to daughter in days to come,” argued Quinn in his program note, placed alongside a large pink rose on each seat.
 
Few of his peers have such a strong signature style as Quinn, whose floral fantasy is pretty instantly recognizable. No wonder he is in such huge demand for partnerships. His collab’ with Tommy Hilfiger in 2022 was unfortunately rather washed in a thunderstorm struck show on New York’s East River. But it was the best linkup in eons with the American designer.   
 
Quinn’s show on a wet Saturday night in Bishopsgate also featured some fab’ floral bottles of blended Scottish whisky entitled ‘Royal Salute’ which made for great cocktails. And next week in Milan, Richard will unveil a capsule collection for Max & Co, of Italian giant Max Mara.
 
Though today in London it was a triumph of UK couture.