Erdem Moralıoğlu was born in Montreal in November 1977, a twin, to a Turkish father, Erkal, a chemical engineer, and an English mother, Marlene, a secretary, who had met while working in Geneva.
After Marianopolis College he took a BA in fashion at Ryerson Polytechnic (now Toronto Metropolitan University) and interned with Vivienne Westwood. In 2000 he moved to London on a Chevening Scholarship to study for a master's at the Royal College of Art. On graduating in 2003 he worked in New York for Diane von Furstenberg, then returned to London in 2005 to found his own label, Erdem.
The label's success was recognised early: the Swarovski British Fashion Council Fashion Enterprise Award in 2007, the BFC's Fashion Forward award in 2008, the New Establishment award in 2012, Red Carpet Designer of the Year in 2013 and British Womenswear Designer of the Year in 2014. In 2017 he was named International Canadian Designer of the Year at the Canadian Arts & Fashion Awards.
In 2017 he designed a collaboration for H&M, his first menswear, with campaign visuals by Baz Luhrmann; menswear became a permanent part of the label in 2021. In 2018 he designed costumes for 24 dancers in Christopher Wheeldon's Corybantic Games at the Royal Opera House.
He has said he was drawing women before he could explain why: "As a young boy, I drew pictures of women, never men." He lost both his parents in his twenties, and remains close to his twin sister. "It's so important to me that people can actually wear my clothes: that they fit," he told the Guardian in 2016.
His collections are built around historical women, real and imagined, whom he describes as an ongoing "imaginary conversation". For Spring 2024, shown at the British Museum, he was given access to the archives at Chatsworth and to the wardrobe of the late Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, a devotee of Lanvin, Balmain, Givenchy and Dior who also loved her chickens and Elvis Presley. He repurposed historic curtain fabric from the house into patchwork capes, and the embroidery was worked by the duchess's great-granddaughter Cecily Lasnet. Chatsworth then mounted an exhibition, Imaginary Conversations, from June to October 2024, setting the collection beside its sources, including Lucian Freud's portrait of the duchess. Fall 2024 drew on Maria Callas at the height of her powers.
In February 2026 the label celebrated twenty years with a Fall 2026 London show watched by Glenn Close, Helen Mirren and Ben Whishaw. Guests received a letter naming his muses, among them Radclyffe Hall and the botanical painter Marianne North. "This is not a show about nostalgia, but about continuity," it read. The collection reworked his archive, including a redraped version of his 2006 silk wedding dress and two looks made from twenty years of embroidery swatches; he remains, as Vogue noted, at the helm of an independent British house.
He was appointed MBE in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to fashion. He lives and works in Bethnal Green, East London, and has been married since 2018 to the architect Philip Joseph.