The tourist tax is crazy. We have to make London more attractive for international shoppers

Erudite, charming, on time (early, actually), Erdem Moralıoğlu is something of a model specimen.

- DYLAN JONES

If fashion designers can be caricatured with indecent haste, 47-year-old Erdem is anything but the cliché. Cultured, well-mannered and not in the least bit hysterical, you can imagine him as a perfect dinner party guest, the kind who is interested as well as interesting.

He is now a Londoner through and through. His first memory of the city is being hoisted up by his father on to the foot of a lion in Trafalgar Square. He w a s f i ve a n d L o n d o n s e e m e d h u g e . “Everything began for me in London. My mum was from Birmingham, my father was from eastern Turkey, and I was born in Canada, but for me London is where everything sort of begins,” he says. “London is an amazing place to live, work and create. It’s special.”

These days he shares his impeccable five-storey Bloomsbury townhouse with his husband, interior designer Philip Joseph, 45. Before moving here, they lived in Hackney for 15 years, but these days can walk to his store in Mayfair.

They met two decades ago when they were both studying at the Royal College of Art. The pair are sophisticates of the first water; Erdem owns a complete volume of the Yellow Book, the magazine produced by Aubrey Beardsley from 1894 to 1897 (named after the yellow covers they would put on risqué French novels), and recent collections have been inspired by the work of novelist Radclyffe Hall and by Deborah Mitford. Even the plants in their house have artistic significance — including a Sparrmannia africana, “one of Lucian Freud’s favourites”. A photo collage by David Hockney sits above their bed. Erdem is a perfectionist, and his house is testament to this.

The designer completed a BA in fashion in Toronto and moved to London in 2000 for his MA at the Royal College, before launching his eponymous label in 2005. His super-chic clothes are worn by former US first lady Michelle Obama, fashion maven Alexa Chung, the actors Keira Knightley and Julianne Moore, and even Meghan Markle.