For Spring/ Summer 2027, Erdem Moralıoğlu turns to Barbette, the aerialist who became a sensation of 1920s Paris, and finds in him a muse for a collection concerned with the seductive space between identities.
Barbette, born Vander Clyde Broadway, performed as a woman and descended the trapeze as a man, transforming himself into the spectacle. In Paris, Jean Cocteau recognised something more complicated than disguise: masculinity and femininity were both roles, performed with such conviction that neither could claim to be the final truth. He called it the “supernatural sex of beauty”. It is this very idea that gives this collection its charge.
Erdem has always understood beauty as something constructed, but here the architecture is pulled apart. Masculine and feminine forms are pushed towards one another, then separated again. The effect is not about deciding where one ends and the other begins, but about enjoying the tension while it lasts.
There is something apt about Barbette as a muse for Erdem. Aerial performance depends on illusion, but also on strength that remains hidden beneath the spectacle. The contradiction of delicacy sustained by force feels central to the collection. Beauty is not presented as fragility, but as something with muscle behind it.
The clothes inhabit that suspended space. Rather than treating gender as a binary, Erdem approaches it as choreography: movement, performance, transformation. There is a sense of clothes becoming something different depending on who wears them, how they move and what they reveal.
And that is what makes this feel like Erdem at his most assured. The reference is very specific, but the idea is expansive. Barbette becomes less a historical character than a proposition: that identity can be authored, that beauty can remain unresolved, that the interesting thing about a person might be the space between what they appear to be and what they might become.
The result is Erdem’s best collection to date. Not because it abandons the romance and beauty that define the house, but because it gives them tension, ambiguity and movement. A century after Barbette first took to the trapeze, Erdem finds contemporary meaning in the high wire.
by Imogen Clark