A pair of slippers sits neatly beside a bed. The bedframe is classic William IV – the mahogany elaborately carved with foliage; the heavy chintz drapes hung à la Polonaise. In the background, you can just see that the room’s wallpaper is Chinese- inspired, handpainted c1800. The Wellington Dressing Room – named after the Duke of Wellington, who stayed here in 1843 – has a grandeur befitting Chatsworth House, the 126-room Derbyshire mansion built at the high point of the 16th century. But the slippers? They’re pure rock chic. Once belonging to the late Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, the house’s châtelaine in the decades following the second world war, the slippers are printed with a picture of Elvis Presley’s handsome face.
The scene – imagined, but perhaps once real, who knows? – was both created and captured on film by the British-Turkish fashion designer Erdem Moralıoğlu. “I love the idea of almost rationalising the spaces in the house,” he says. “Her shoes, put near a bed; a dress hanging on the wall. A space is no longer a big stairway with a big painted ceiling, it’s a place where someone left a bag… where someone slipped off a dress and slung it over the back of the bed. There’s almost something cinematic about it, like something’s happened, or is about to happen.” His photographs tell the story of a house that is not simply a historical monument and totem of the British aristocracy, but a “living, breathing thing”.
Moralıoğlu’s photo essay for HTSI is a companion piece to both his eponymous label’s spring-summer womenswear collection, inspired by Deborah (“Debo”), and a new exhibition opening at Chatsworth this month. Imaginary Conversations shows the process behind creating the collection, and weaves its own threads between the archive, the house, the Duchess and her descendants. “It’s the imagined conversation because I never met her,” says Moralıoğlu. “It’s like the conversation that I would have loved to have had with her. But it’s also a conversation between a designer and an archive, a designer and a house. A woman and her house.”
Moralıoğlu was first invited to Chatsworth by Laura Burlington. In 2006, as the buyer for The Shop at Bluebird, she had bought Moralıoğlu’s debut collection and they became friends; the following year she married William Cavendish, Deborah’s grandson and heir. In 2017, when one of Moralıoğlu’s dresses was included in the Chatsworth House Style exhibition, she invited him to stay. “It was a rainy day, with a grey sky, and this beautiful building emerged from this very green valley,” he says of rounding the corner and first seeing the house. “I particularly remember the gold of the windows. But it wasn’t really until I started walking through the house that I understood the age of it and how it’s constantly evolving with every generation. I think that’s what’s so fascinating, and what I particularly loved about the story of Deborah Mitford.”
Deborah Mitford, famed beauty and socialite, sister of the author Nancy, had married Andrew Cavendish in 1941. In the war years that followed, Chatsworth was used as a girls’ boarding school, for students evacuated from Penrhos College, Wales. The couple didn’t expect to inherit, but after the deaths of Andrew’s father and brother the property came to them – with the maximum rate of death duties. The debt burden was staggering – they had to repay £4.72mn (about £500mn today) in the years after the war. To counter some of the obligation – and while divesting themselves of huge swaths of land and property – Debo moved the family back into the house. “You have to put yourself back in that time, really, to understand their contribution,” says Burlington. “They saved Chatsworth. It took them years. Debo set about starting a lot of businesses, the farm shop, the gift shops, books, licensing, which have been nurtured by my parents-in-law. They also made the house and its contents into a charity – the money that comes from visitors pays to restore and look after the building. We as a family own much of the contents, and lend that to the charity. It shouldn’t work, but it does. They set up that structure to protect Chatsworth, for the nation essentially, with the intention that it is enjoyed by as many people as possible.” Total visitor numbers in 2023 crested at a little over 600,000.
“She had a lot going for her,” says Burlington of the Duchess’s continued appeal. “She was good-looking. And very funny. She wasn’t low on charm or charisma. And the spectrum of her interests made her a very interesting character – she was kind of high culture, low culture, you know? She walked on both sides of the track.”
Chickens, farming, Elvis and bejewelled bug brooches are a few of the Duchess’s obsessions that made it into motifs on Moralıoğlu’s SS24 collection: low ’50s heels with a floppy-bow look, like chickens’ combs; cropped and embellished leather jackets are inspired by The King. But he also captures the nuances of her spirit: a dress made using old curtain fabric from the Chatsworth archives reflects her fastidious commitment to make do and mend; pouffy tapestry skirts in electric hues nod to her decision to sell a set of hunting tapestries to keep the house afloat. “They’re little clues as to who she was,” says Moralıoğlu. What excites him is “the idea of formality versus informality. Her with her waxed coat, tending to her cows and chickens, versus the iconic Cecil Beaton imagery of her in a formal gown, taking on the house. A Duchess. It’s that push and pull.”
“Anyone can make an exhibition inspired by Deborah where twinsets and pearls come waltzing down the catwalk, but not anyone can really take it somewhere,” says Burlington. “Erdem goes into this body of research, exploration and ideas, and then he feeds it to his studio: the earring person doing that, the textile person doing this, the accessory team doing the other. It’s like someone with an orchestra, conducting. This exhibition will focus on that process.”
She hopes that it will also help people to “understand that we have an archive and that Chatsworth is not just what you physically see. In many ways, it’s like a depository of objects. I hope that people are reminded of Debo and that time, in a nostalgic way. And I hope they will understand the process of what it takes to make a fashion collection.”
One of the challenges with any historic home, says Burlington, is “how to make these places stay relevant, stay important and stay useful to people”. Many others have been turned into hotels, schools, conference centres or spas. Collaborating and allowing people into the heart of Chatsworth, its archive, its world, is key. “Chatsworth has always drawn creative people into its vortex, in a way. And I think that’s something that William and I really believe in, you know? You don’t need to have all the ideas yourself, but you need to know people who have got the ideas.”
It works both ways. One of the photographs in Moralıoğlu’s series features the curtain-fabric dress hanging in the Chintz Case Cover Store. The dress is embroidered by Cecily Lasnet, a great-granddaughter of the Duchess. “She’s an extraordinary artist and interested in textiles,” says Moralıoğlu. “She did an apprenticeship in the studio and I loved the idea that Debo’s great-granddaughter might embroider fabric that had belonged to her. That dress is representative of something that goes full circle.”
Full circle or an imagined conversation? Both, perhaps. “It’s legacy and longevity and the threads of something,” says Moralıoğlu. “How you move forward while keeping something, but not being weighed down by it. Rather, you’re carrying it on.”
Imaginary Conversations: An Erdem Collection Inspired by Duchess Deborah is on display in the guest bedrooms of Chatsworth from 22 June to 20 October (chatsworth.org)
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