‘It’s essential to be surrounded by silence sometimes’: Erdem Moralıoğlu

Every one of my collections has started, in some way, shape or form, with a book. Since my husband bought me a membership for my birthday, the London Library has been a critical part of my creative process. There’s something in the walls here that’s difficult to articulate. How many places in London have Virginia Woolf, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens and TS Eliot all spent time in? The moment you enter the building, it opens up like an Escher drawing with steel stairways reaching up and down. I try to get a seat in the window facing St James’s Square, pull out my notebook and pencil, and begin. Some days things don’t come to me, but on others I’m led down a rabbit hole of extraordinarily unexpected tangents. My Spring Summer 2026 collection, for example, was inspired by Hélène Smith, a French spiritualist. One of the wonderful librarians here helped me research the hieroglyphic language Smith had developed, which informed an embroidery motif, and also the brocade fabric used during the royal court of Versailles, where Smith had experienced visions of herself living as Marie Antoinette. Libraries have always been important to me. My late mum was a passionate reader and presented them as somewhere amazingly exciting. Even when I was a student at the Royal College of Art, I worked in a library. There are so few places in the world where you are met with almost complete silence. It’s essential to be surrounded by it sometimes.