Almost Two Decades After Launching Their Label, Erdem Launches A Bag

Plenty of us dream about, read about, and fantasize about fairy-tale endings. Fairy-tale beginnings, though? Not so much—unless you’re Erdem Moralioglu. After almost two decades of building his namesake label around dreamy dresses and romantic brocades fit for storybook heroines in array after array of lush botanicals, he’s only now setting about launching a bag—called, appropriately enough, the Bloom.

“It felt like something I wanted to do before we turned 20,” says Moralioglu, laughing. “It started with the last collection, which really got me thinking about different iterations of accessories and the idea of crafting something. We started playing with a singular piece of leather, and it was a very organic process.” What emerged from all that was a distinctive handbag—one that emphasizes the dualities of pragmatism and poetry, masculine and feminine, that form the through line in his work. The Bloom, which will be available in November, will come in three colorways (green, black, and cream), two sizes (the medium and mini), and two fabrications (calfskin leather and velvet).

WILD THINGS
The designer’s beloved Great Dixter gardens in Sussex. Photo: Universal Images Group/Getty Images.

The bag debuted at Erdem’s spring 2025 show in London, which was inspired by the pioneering early-20th-century writer Radclyffe Hall. “Hall lived under the name John, wore men’s suits, and lived very openly with a partner named Una,” he explains, “and there was something about the bag and the gesture of clutching it very close to yourself that felt like an interesting contrast to the very masculine silhouettes I was exploring.”

On the practical side, the Bloom’s boxy shape is soft and malleable, so you won’t ever have to be precious about it. The whimsy and the poetry, meanwhile, shine through in the Art Nouveau–like sculptural brass bloom that doubles as the bag’s top handle. Artisan-crafted in Forlì (a small city northeast of Florence)—each handle alone takes hours to sculpt—it resembles something of a cross between a rose and a tulip. (The bag can also be worn as a crossbody with its detachable strap.)

Moralioglu’s love for flowers has its roots in his Montreal childhood, where he spent his adolescence in what he describes as a “perfectly square yellow-stucco bungalow in the suburbs” framed by a garden of tulips tended to by his mother. Today—when he and his husband, architect Philip Joseph, aren’t off for a visit to their favorite gardens at Great Dixter in East Sussex—you’ll find him tending to his own flowering plot in his Bloomsbury town house. While it overlooks a deconsecrated cemetery, it’s where Moralioglu finds the most abundant beauty. “It’s tiny, and was an unruly beast when we first moved in, in 2020, but now we have beautiful magnolia blossoms and roses coming together,” he says. Like the ending to a lot of stories, sometimes it takes a while for the magic to reveal itself.