ERDEM, Luxury, and the Art of Literary Allusion
FSW explores fashion's long love affair with literature and how ERDEM harnesses literary allusion in creative design.
Fashion Strategy Weekly en Été is a series of essays, reviews, and videos to keep you informed about fashion and luxury strategy during the warmer months ahead. We will tilt our coverage towards lifestyle, travel, wellness, and aesthetics to keep you company this summer and help you gear up for the fall fashion season. New posts will be released weekly throughout July and August.
“The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that by seeing nothing it might avoid Truth. ”
― Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
In 1926, British author Radclyffe Hall made a pact with her publisher Jonathan Cape to have full editorial control over her next novel. Not one word of the book was to be altered. While an unusual arrangement, Hall was at the top of her career after the recent success of her novel Adam’s Breed.
The next book in question was The Well of Loneliness, a now seminal work published in 1928 that follows the life of Stephen Gordon, an upper-class English lesbian. Hall’s book immediately came under criticism for being profane and even excessive in its negative portrayal of homosexual life in France. It was the subject of controversy and a lawsuit that resulted in a full ban within France. Well ahead of its time, Hall’s The Well of Loneliness was a groundbreaking work of queer literature, making a full-fledged plea for acceptance: “Give us also the right to our existence.”
Luxury fashion storytelling is no stranger to literary allusions. So, it is no surprise that Radclyffe Hall’s boundary-pushing spirit would inspire a literature-loving designer like Erdem Moralioglu, whose ERDEM Pre-Spring 2025 collection was influenced by his discovery of Hall’s works at the London Library.
From a content strategy perspective, literary allusion is a smart brand storytelling strategy for a luxury brand. But, it only works in practice if it is consistent across touchpoints and deeply connects to the brand and designer’s vision and values.
Erdem, the London Librarian
Storytelling is in Erdem Moralioglu’s blood and imbues everything he touches in fashion. This purposeful narrative approach permeates his designs and his brand right down to the ever-so-slightly serif “ERDEM” logo.
Dubbed “The London Librarian,” Moralioglu is well known for using London as a real-life library of creative inspiration for his designs. In an interview for Liberty London, Moralioglu once noted: “When I start a collection, I need that narrative to propel me forward in the creative process.”
For ERDEM, Moralioglu’s namesake brand, narrative forms a purposeful pillar of its brand strategy. Instead of a corporate blog, ERDEM has a magazine, A Magazine Curated By, which explores “personal themes and a collection of contemporary creative content.”
ERDEM’s product and marketing teams lean into literary allusion within a well-defined narrative framework to communicate the value, context, and story with precision for every collection. For instance, the product overview page for ERDEM’s Pre-Spring 2025 collection situates the garments as such:
For Pre-Spring 25, ERDEM has taken inspiration from the author Radclyffe Hall, during the publication in the 1920s of her controversial (today celebrated) book: The Well of Loneliness… ERDEM’s collection plays with the tension between masculine and feminine styles and silhouettes of the 1920s, exploring power and vulnerability simultaneously.
This description not only articulates ERDEM’s “why” for this specific collection but it also outlines how the designs execute upon this narrative inspiration.
For ERDEM, literary allusion is a fundamental part of its design strategy and content strategy across channels, including its product and marketing content.
(As a gentle reminder, at FSW, we make a critical differentiation between a brand’s content strategy, which is an overarching plan for content across digital and IRL touchpoints, and its content marketing strategy, which is “content strategy for marketing.”)
Fashion, the Sister Arts, and the Illusive Allusive
Why is literary allusion so powerful in luxury fashion?
Is it because literary references stir an inner nostalgia, especially from familiar stories? Is it because literature as a form of content inherently has a story, structure, and purpose? Or is it because literature as storytelling is the output of the human creative imagination and luxury fashion is a manifestation of this same creative drive?
For the same reason that fashion and opera have a long shared history, there is a deep relationship between fashion and literature. In no small way, they are sister arts, intertwined both in theory and practice for millennia.
The idea of a synergy between the arts is as old as books themselves. There’s an entire field of philosophy—aesthetics—devoted to thinking on this subject. In Ars Poetica, the Greek lyric poet Horace wrote, “ut pictura poesis” or “as in painting, so is poetry.” Even though figures like Oscar Wilde have condemned fashion as ephemeral and therefore not an art, many other creatives throughout history have written exactly the opposite.
Consider Karl Lagerfeld’s famous statement: “Fashion is a language that creates itself in clothes to interpret reality.” This gives fashion the essential qualities of literature, as a mode of creative output and critical interpretation.
Literature is a place of inspiration for many luxury fashion designers simply because they are artists. Creativity begets creativity.
Literary Allusion, Content Pillars, and the Why of Luxury Content
In luxury content, literary allusion is powerful because it usually begets more intentional, elevated storytelling. It also means that creative teams are working with already-defined systems of meaning and an extant story from which to draw inspiration. Not starting from scratch is never a bad thing and for fashion, it can be the focus that design and marketing teams need to create truly cohesive, sellable products.
Literary allusion is also smart product marketing. Stories sell. Consistent, cohesive vision sells.
Let us not also forget the delights that literature and, by corollary, literary allusion, can bring. For one, there are literature’s great fashion icons—Holly Golightly, Anna Karenina, Gigi, Jane Eyre, and Orlando, to name a few, never mind Miranda Priestly. Then, there are authors turned fashion icons, like Joan Didion, who appeared in a Celine campaign by photographer Juergen Teller. Designer Sonia Rykiel has written several books, as have other designers. And then there are the countless fashion collections throughout history full of literary allusion, most recently including John Galliano’s Victorian underworld in his Maison Margiela Artisanal Spring/Summer 2024 collection.
For the right luxury brand, like ERDEM, literary allusion can function as an essential pillar of brand strategy and, in turn, its omnichannel content strategy, empowering brand storytelling across channels in expected and unexpected ways.