The centenary of the birth of Maria Callas—La Divina, the Tigress—is being celebrated this week. Her voice, her celebrity, the drama and tragedy of her career and love-life—and the fanatical world-wide publicity she enjoyed and then endured in the 1950s—make her a perfect subject for Erdem Moralioglu. His pre-fall begins his tribute to her fierce glamour and complex character, a contemporary operatic fashion duet, really.
“She wasn’t a delicate soprano—she was a force with a raw, powerful extraordinary voice,” he observed at a preview, talking about the research he’d done on Callas at London’s Royal Opera House. Her soigné image is caught in black-and-white press photographs as she moved before and after performances through crowds as huge as any that Hollywood actors or, later, pop stars could draw. “She was dressed by Madame Biki, a Roman couturier who is almost forgotten, though she was the granddaughter of Puccini,” Moralioglu pointed out, admiring the nipped silhouettes of her dresses, the extravagant necklines, the elegance of post-war Italian alta moda.
Getting into character—as it were—is a creative process that plays out in Moralioglu’s mind over his pre- and mainline collections. Last season, it was his triumphant two-part series on Debo Devonshire; before that, there were two episodes inspired by the stories of the fallen Victorian women who were housed at the same Bloomsbury address he now owns. His pre-fall 24 is a more of an empathetic psychological study of what it takes to be a performer of Callas’s magnitude. “Onstage-offstage. The kind of transformation that happens to someone stepping off stage. Looking at how someone can be as vulnerable and powerful as Callas was, at the same time.”
It’s not costume. Moralioglu very well understands the feeling his customers have of going out in public today; when how you look will be captured and critiqued on phones and social media forever. His Callas-sourced clues probably don’t read until you get down to his pre-fall cocktail and evening dresses. The flourish of a carnation-pink bow-sash, wrapped around the torso of a slim black midi dress, which then turns into a sort of train. Or a strapless one, made entirely of 3-D roses, a little faded and romantically squashed—a memory, perhaps, of flowers thrown at Callas’s feet at the end of one of her great performances at La Scala in Milan.
The point is that he sees day as well. His roses are also strewn graphically across a black and white menswear check coat and sheath dress. Big, blue cabbage roses—so reminiscent of the 1950s—appear on full-skirted cotton summer frocks (as they were called back then). Pre-fall drops in June. That’s plenty in time for weddings, film festivals, and all of that. But knowing Moralioglu, this is only him tuning up for the full Callas aria experience at his show in February.
