“Happy House”—the punk classic by Siouxsie and the Banshees—blasted out as the finale music, and honestly? It landed. Hard. Put aside the plaintive edge of Siouxsie’s voice for a second and it felt exactly right for Erdem’s 20th anniversary. Two decades of building a fashion house rooted in romantic optimism, in the radical idea that clothes can make women feel… happy. That’s not nothing. That’s a philosophy.

Erdem Moralıoğlu was very clear backstage: this was not meant to feel like a retrospective. Even after a procession of collaged brocades and satins, diamanté brooches, ribbons, lace, feathers—basically an Erdem fever dream—walked through the galleries of Tate Britain. “It’s a mash-up,” he said. “An imaginary dialogue between everyone who’s inspired me.” And when he says everyone, he means everyone: the ghosts he’s met through research at the London Library, Chatsworth, Windsor Castle, the National Portrait Gallery, Bloomsbury, Kew Gardens; queer Victorian and Edwardian social histories; La Scala Milan; the V&A archives. A lifetime of looking, collecting, remembering.

You could see those conversations stitched directly into the clothes. The inside-out floral quilted opera coat Barbours—now a permanent house collaboration with Barbour—came from an imagined meeting with Deborah Cavendish at Chatsworth. The luscious watermelon lace pannier dress nodded to a photograph of Una Vincenzo, lover of the novelist Radclyffe Hall. References to Elizabeth II surfaced in ballgown silhouettes and beribboned regalia, while veiled tailoring traced back to an encounter with the Victoria and Albert Museum archives.

Then there was the cream lace nightgown dress—now inflated with crinoline hoops so the skirt hovered, floated—which reached all the way back to Moralıoğlu’s long-standing fantasy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from his spring 2009 breakthrough collection. Memory layered on memory. Not in a literal, checklist way—but in a feeling way.

And that’s the key. You didn’t need a PhD in Erdem-ology to get it. “I wanted a looseness about it,” he said afterward. And you could feel that looseness—the chopped-up, bricolage quality, the sense that things had been lovingly handled, rearranged, lived with. Some of that came from his upcycling of textile and embroidery swatches, like a lemon satin pencil dress scattered with sparkly fern motifs. Familiar, but newly alive.

He was midway through talking about the origin of the jeans and hacked-off halternecks—his Royal College of Art graduate collection—when he was gently derailed by reality. Glenn Close and Helen Mirren appeared. Then Ruth Wilson. All of them had been applauding from the benches, alongside Keira Knightley, Ben Whishaw, and Russell Tovey. His longtime designer friends from the mid-2000s London scene were there too—Christopher and Tammy Kane, Roksanda Ilinčić—and his architect husband Philip Joseph, all visibly beaming in the background of the photos.

It felt communal. Earned. Warm. A house built slowly, deliberately, with care—and still standing strong 20 years in.

A happy house, indeed.