A Designer for Whom 25 Heads Are Better Than One

About a year ago, Erdem Moralioglu’s husband, the architect Philip Joseph, 45, told him to stop buying busts. The British Turkish fashion designer, 46, didn’t listen — and has continued to populate their London home with figures purchased from flea markets and small auction houses. These “roommates,” as Moralioglu calls them, are situated among the couple’s portrait paintings (“The dourer and more melancholic,” he says, “the better”) and contemporary photographs by Rineke Dijkstra, Nan Goldin and Candida Höfer. Many of the busts are by unknown artists and share a common aesthetic: attenuated features and graceful lines. It’s no coincidence that Moralioglu — a purveyor of romantic silhouettes made from sumptuous fabrics — begins each design sketch with a face. “The pieces that I’m attracted to have a slight illustrative quality to them,” he says. “There’s a strange correlation between the way I draw and the way some of the busts look.”

The collection: Wood, plaster, terra-cotta, marble and bronze busts, between 10 and 18 inches tall, largely from the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.

Number of pieces in the collection: About 25.

First purchase: A bronze bust by the German artist Wilhelm Lehmbruck, active during the 1910s. A contemporary of the Modernist Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, Lehmbruck was best known for making elongated figures whose downcast eyes and bowed heads embodied the despair of wartime. “I bought it 12 or so years ago at a local auction in Newcastle, England,” he says. “Now I have four by him.”

Last purchase: “Every morning I go through my auction alerts. In October I bought an elegant 1920s marble piece by the Belgian sculptor Leon Sarteel. I have it next to an illustration from the same period; it looks almost like the sculpted version of the drawing.”

Least expensive: “A 40 euro wooden bust I bought at a market in France. The long-necked, long-nosed male figure resembles [an Amedeo] Modigliani painting in three dimensions.”