Behind the seams at the museum

High above Trafalgar Square, a world apart from the visitors thronging around the Van Goghs and Turners below, is the Conservation Department of the National Gallery. Accessible by freight elevator, or several flights of Escherian stairs, here, there are no audio guides or gift shops – only easels bearing exceptional artworks, and specialists working to restore them.

“This room is really where the collection began,” says Erdem Moralıoğlu, taking in with a sweep the black-painted walls soaring 20 feet to the glazed roof above, the Renaissance canvases and the tables of conservation materials that inspired his spring/summer 2023 collection.

Moralıoğlu is a fashion designer entranced by history. Museums and libraries are his natural habitat, and the stories within them form the basis of layered, intensely narrative collections. Since launching his eponymous label in 2005, his feminine designs have attracted clients including the Princess of Wales, Julianne Moore and Michelle Obama.

None of which made his initial overtures to Larry Keith, head of conservation and keeper of the National Gallery, any less surprising. “His work is completely outside of my normal professional experience,” says Keith.

On Moralıoğlu’s first visit, in April 2022, he arrived to find Keith engrossed in work on an imposing Parmigianino altarpiece. The 16th-century artwork, nearly 3.5 metres tall, depicts Saint Jerome’s vision of John the Baptist revealing the Virgin and Jesus. It has a rich history. Renaissance art historian Giorgio Vasari wrote that Parmigianino carried on painting it through the sack of Rome, and it was one of the first pieces added to the National Gallery’s core collection when it opened, in 1824.

Since then, its condition has deteriorated. “There were sections of it that had just gone,” says Moralıoğlu, an avid art collector who has also worked with specialists to restore a water-damaged drawing and repair a torn painting. “There’s incredible technical skill and a forensic level of research that goes into restoration. But there’s also an intuitive and emotional side of it.” Of the Parmigianino piece, he says, “When something’s so gone, the restorer almost has to become the artist.”

“We are editing, in a way,” Keith agrees. “The work is informed by science and objective criteria, but there are decisions you take, which on some level, are interpretive.”

Moralıoğlu and his team toured several conservation departments for research. At the British Museum, they viewed a Michelangelo cartoon and assorted etchings protected by layers of translucent vellum. Next, came the Victoria and Albert Museum’s fashion and textile department (which holds one of Moralıoğlu’s designs – a yellow hand-embroidered boned organza gown from autumn/winter 2008), and finally, Tate Britain. There, they met a group of conservators from the National Museum of Beirut, painstakingly reassembling Roman glass vessels that had shattered in the Port of Beirut explosion of August 2020.

“They’ve made some progress. Of course, you can see the cracks,” says Moralıoğlu, swiping to a photo of a reassembled vase that looks so delicate, a hiccup might smash it again. “I found that so extraordinary and beautiful… I’ve always been interested in undone-ness and the idea of something not being entirely perfect, and the human desire to protect and preserve.”

His trips behind the scenes at the museums filtered into the SS23 collection in unexpected ways. Time-ravaged Old Masters translated into dresses and coats overlaid with silken strands that shivered as the models walked. “I wanted a fabric that felt like it was a canvas that’s just been so worn away, it becomes its threads again.”

Facsimiles of the labels conservators use to track and classify artworks appeared stitched to some hemlines. And all the protective vellums and dust sheets became glass organza veils draped over crystal- and sequin-embellished dresses – “almost like an exploded lab-coat silhouette”.

By the time they reached the actual show, held in the colonnade of the British Museum on the eve of Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral, those veils assumed an elegiac air. Especially when Moralıoğlu exchanged white veils for black. “There was an overriding feeling for all of us that continuing and showing was the right thing to do, and to honour Her Majesty in some way felt absolutely appropriate.” As dusk fell, three ball-gowned, black-veiled models made a slow procession along the runway – a dignified, spine-tingling tribute.

It wasn’t Moralıoğlu’s first time showing at a museum. His gowns and opera coats have rustled through galleries at the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery, where one could almost imagine the pearl- and brocade-bedecked duchesses looking on in envy from their frames.

“I love a museum. There’s just something in the walls of those kinds of extraordinary places. It’s also about being part of London – when you’re here, in a city that’s home to these extraordinary spaces, how great to be able to use them in an interesting way.”

Born in Montreal to an English mother and Turkish father, Moralıoğlu came to England for a study-abroad year from his fashion college in Canada. An internship – his only one – with Vivienne Westwood convinced him that he had to continue his studies in the UK. He took up a place at the Royal College of Art, in 2001, and launched his first collection in 2005, making him part of a wavelet of then-young designers who nudged London’s reputation as a centre of anarchic creativity in a more luxurious direction.

The erstwhile newcomer is now New Establishment, with an MBE, a boutique on London’s South Audley Street and stockists including MatchesFashion and Bergdorf Goodman. He has kept his brand independent – a representative says that Erdem’s sales grew 70 per cent year-on-year, in 2022.

Back in the Conservation Department, Keith shines a UV light on to the Parmigianino altarpiece to reveal areas of alteration – a dappling of fresh paint imperceptible in natural light. He expects to complete several years of restoration soon. “Hopefully, this summer.”

As for Moralıoğlu, in another life, it would be easy to imagine him relishing a museum career. Is he ever envious of these specialists who operate on the scale of years, while he creates collection after collection, every few months?

He considers. “In fashion, we’re part of a system that operates at an extraordinary speed. We have conversations about how difficult it is to maintain the pace, but actually there’s something about it that I like.”

In the past, he’s described every collection he designs as a different chapter in the same book. “There’s something freeing in the ability to turn the page and begin again. Where’s she going to go next? What’s going to happen? I find that so exciting.” 

All photographed for the FT by Stephen Burridge

Model, Mila H at Milk Management; photographer’s assistant, Emily Cockram; hair stylist, Yoshitaka Miyazaki; make-up artist, Jane Richardson

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