The woman who recurs in fashion designer Erdem Moralıoğlu’s romantic, story-focused collections has worn many faces. She has been a Victorian botanist painting her way around the world, a prima ballerina in her 40s partnered with a dancer half her age, an opera singer who walked away from the stage at the height of her fame, and a novelist whose book was banned within months of publication. For one season, she was even a Genevan medium convinced that she had previously lived on Mars. ‘She has never been one woman,’ Moralıoğlu says of the ‘her’ in ‘About Time, About Her’, the first major survey of his two-decade career, which has just opened at M7 in Doha. ‘I’m interested in the distance between a person’s private identity and their public perception.’ It is in that distance – one that is, ultimately, about both the power and friction of narrative – that his work dwells.

Curated by Olivier Gabet, Director of Decorative Arts at the Louvre, the show gathers more than 150 pieces across five chapters, from atelier ephemera and early sketches to garments placed in conversation with works from Doha’s Museum of Islamic Art. In the exhibition’s first chapter, visitors meet the white pleated gown that closed the London-based designer’s debut runway show at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in 2006. Seeing it again, he says, ‘revealed how many of my early preoccupations remain relevant.’ In February he reworked it for The Imaginary Conversation, his 20th-anniversary collection.

Here are five exhibition highlights from ‘About Time, About Her’ that reveal the wide-ranging artistic interests that have shaped Moralıoğlu’s vision.

The conservators, Spring/Summer 2023

In the spring of 2022, Moralıoğlu and his studio decamped to the conservation departments of the National Gallery, Tate Britain, the British Museum, and the V&A, watching the teams of restorers who bring precious objects and paintings back from the brink. At the National Gallery, they observed Larry Keith revive a 16th-century Parmigianino; at the V&A, the process of an 18th-century embroidered dress being coaxed upright over a tulle scaffold. What struck Moralıoğlu was ‘the revelation of what exists beneath a painting’s surface.’ The resulting collection made a virtue of showing its workings: exposed construction details, hems tagged like archival objects, organza falling over crystal-studded dresses the way a dust sheet veils a sculpture in storage. They were clothes cut to look ‘partially restored or unfinished,’ which is to say caught in the middle of being cared for.

In the wings, Autumn/Winter 2021

When Margot Fonteyn first danced with Rudolf Nureyev in 1962, she was 42 and he was 23. The photographs Moralıoğlu kept returning to were not of her on stage but of the hours either side: in rehearsal, in the wings, off duty. He had seen that world up close himself in 2018, when he designed the costumes for Christopher Wheeldon’s Corybantic Games for the Royal Ballet at the Royal Opera House. Returning to the idea of the dancer for whom the stage, while the focal point, is actually the briefest part of a working life, the collection nodded to both Fonteyn and Moira Shearer’s incandescent performance in Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948). The results? Plumed skirts, headbands, and jeweled gowns pulled on over rehearsal knits – not just worn, but danced in, by a cast that included four ballerinas alongside the models, among them Marguerite Porter, a former Royal Ballet principal then aged 72. Moralıoğlu was after ‘the contrast between the discipline of ballet and the heightened theatricality of performance,’ and found the clothes changed by the bodies inside them. Movement, he says, gave them ‘a dimension that could never be fully understood when static.’

Medea in fragments, Autumn/Winter 2024

For Autumn/Winter 2024, the starting point was Maria Callas’s Medea: the landmark 1953 performance by opera’s great diva, which has no complete visual record. That absence was the whole draw. ‘What remains are fragments through which one can begin to imagine the whole,’ Moralıoğlu says. The setting underlined his point: The collection was shown in the British Museum among the Parthenon Marbles, whose partial figures we must reimagine from the severed limbs and noseless faces that survive. A singer performed the aria live, and the model Guinevere van Seenus opened the show in a pale green opera coat over a bralette, then returned at its end, in the same coat thick with embroidered roses – an irresistible curtain call. ‘That space between historical fact and interpretation is central to my process,’ Moralıoğlu observes. But for him, there is no definitive moment of switching from research to making: ‘One informs the other, and gradually a character and a collection begin to take shape.’

A Martian alphabet, Spring/Summer 2026, Look 41

Hélène Smith, a Genevan medium of the 1890s, believed she had lived many lives: as Marie Antoinette, as an Indian princess, and on Mars, whose landscapes she painted and whose language she recorded in trances. The psychologist Théodore Flournoy made her famous with his book From India to the Planet Mars in 1900, the Surrealists adopted her as a mascot, and then she slipped from view, until her pictures appeared in the main exhibition of the 2022 Venice Biennale and caught Moralıoğlu’s eye. Her alphabet appealed because it was ‘something so personal and entirely invented, yet it had its own visual structure.’ In Look 41, its symbols are embroidered in jet crystals over a skeletal bustier cage built from collaged remnants of antique lace, so that scraps of an actual past carry the script of an imagined one, ‘almost as though the dress itself carried a secret message.’

What keeps returning

For Spring/Summer 2025 Moralıoğlu paid homage to the English lesbian author Radclyffe Hall, cutting suits with the Savile Row tailor Edward Sexton and sewing the title page of the banned first edition of The Well of Loneliness (1928) onto cuffs. Hall belongs in a Queer pantheon that runs throughout Moralıoğlu’s oeuvre and includes George Sand and Fanny and Stella, the cross-dressing pair arrested in Victorian London. These are figures for whom, he says, ‘clothing was integral to the construction and expression of identity.’ The relationship between the masculine and the feminine is a repeat preoccupation. ‘I don’t think I will ever stop being fascinated by the lives of people who have existed outside the conventions of their time,’ he says. ‘There are always more stories to discover.’