admin Erdem Moralioglu’s spring collection was a tour-de-force, a very English romance and detailed love-letter to the character and wardrobe of the late Deborah ‘Debo’ Cavendish, the Mitford girl who married the Duke of Devonshire and famously took on the saving of possibly the grandest of all family estates, Chatsworth House. Debo’s practical country garb, her love of rare breed chickens, her ’50s ballgowns and penchant for bug jewelry and Elvis Presley have inspired countless fashion designers, stylists and photographers over the years. The difference is that Erdem had access.
Some of Debo’s 1940s floral curtains even got whipped up into the skirts of his evening dresses—and, by the looks of it, into the gloriously chintzy fusion of Barbour waxed jacket and voluminous opera coat that opened his show at the British Museum. “I was lucky enough to work with the textile and jewelry archivists at Chatsworth, and with Helen Marchant, her former private secretary,” he said. His research within Debo’s wardobe, her formal portraits, family snaps and the house itself blended into a collection where richly tattered fabrics—as if gently decayed over centuries—were mixed up with all manner of full-skirted vivid print frocks, jeweled lingerie dresses, kilt-suits, unravelling tweeds and Elvis-tribute rock’n’roll crystal-studded leather jackets.
It was peak Erdem, of course. The biographies of strong and unconventional women have always informed the background of his best work—and this subject, as aristocratic a chatelaine and hostess as they come, was also a robustly practical countrywoman and, as he put it, “a strict proponent of make-do and mend.” Debo’s brisk organizing abilities helped save the house after steep death duties brought about the sale to the nation of the 15th century Devonshire Hunting Tapestries (now hanging in the V&A). A blown-up image of the medieval scenery was there today in a blue and white printed dirndl. Her quirky penchant for collecting bug jewelry—which she passed onto her granddaughter Stella Tennant—was caught in dragonfly brooches, and a two-pronged tiara just like a pair of insect antennae.
Was there a bit of Mitfordian wit about the shoes, too? Something about the floppy fabric bows on the toes started to raise the possibility that Erdem might actually have been referencing the feathered feet of rare chicken breeds—another of Debo’s great hobbies. There was serious chic involved as well, though, and an important sense of things being passed down, altered and reused by each generation. At the end, when the flowery cotton antique drapes got mixed up in tulle ball-skirts, there was yet another family contribution in the mix—some black lace embroidery hand-done by Stella Tennant’s daughter Cecily Lasnet, Debo’s great-granddaughter.
