Visions of Marie Antoinette and the shape of her corseted pannier dresses are on the rise in London. Whether it’s connected with the exhibition about her that’s just opened at the V&A is one of fashion’s mysteries, but for Erdem Moralioglu the source of his inspiration was Helene Smith, a late 19th-century French psychic and artist, and a woman who was literally possessed by periodical visions that she belonged to Marie Antoinette’s court.
He came across this strange, forgotten celebrity medium—whose real name was Catherine-Elise Muller—at the 2022 Venice Biennale, which spotlit women Surrealists. Helene Smith, who died in 1929, had been valorized by the Surrealists as a precursor of automatic writing—and for her other episodic claims that she was a reincarnation of a Hindu princess, and communicated with Martians. “She even developed a kind of Martian language in the form of her own coding, and would draw these beautiful kind of landscapes and palaces that she would see,” Moralioglu explained backstage at his British Museum show.
These odd “Romantic cycles” were diagnosed by Theodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology at Geneva University, in his book From India to Planet Mars. “This term ‘romantic’ cycle’ became the backbone of my show.”
The show’s opening look, a caged hip-molded dress made of antique Victorian lace, had black plastic moldings of Helene Smith’s Martian alphabet pinned onto its breast. Some people immediately read it as a prison number—not exactly what the designer meant, but then again, pretty accurate, given Marie Antionette’s fate in her last doomed days as a prisoner in the Conciergie.
Moralioglu’s story-telling is always character-based, though never really that overt in practice. This time, it led him on a trail of allusions to 18th- century antique fabrics: stripes and florals, shredded embroideries and passages of vivid sari-like materials hinting at Smith’s Indian delusions. Practically, they manifested in gorgeous arrays of coats, in caped dresses sparkling with crystal jewelry and, here and there, in black tailored tuxedo jackets and striped trouser suits that rounded out the collection. But where did the tailoring fit the narrative? “Well,” Moralioglu laughed. “I was thinking that was her psychiatrist!”
