Erdem's 2026 Pride collection skips the rainbow entirely, opting instead for a particular shade of blue: the blue Derek Jarman saw through failing eyes in the final months of his life, the blue that became his last film, and the blue now stitched into a limited-edition charity tee fronted by actor Russell Tovey.
The Story Behind the Blue
Derek Jarman was one of British cinema's most defiantly queer voices. Born in 1942, he trained at the Slade School of Fine Art before landing his first major film break as set designer on Ken Russell's provocative The Devils in 1971. He broke into directing with Sebastiane in 1976, a homoerotic retelling of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian that brought the queer male gaze to classical religious imagery, and spent the following decades making films that refused to look away from queer experience: the avant-garde punk drama Jubilee, the unconventional artist biopic Caravaggio, and the 1990 arthouse film The Garden, which recast the crucifixion of Christ as the persecution of a gay couple.
Jarman was diagnosed HIV-positive in December 1986, shortly before the UK government launched its "Don't Die of Ignorance" public health campaign. He became one of the few public figures in Britain to speak openly about living with the virus, using his platform and his art to push back against the stigma suffocating his community.
His final film, Blue, premiered simultaneously on Channel 4 and BBC Radio 3 on 19 September 1993. It is unlike almost anything else in cinema: a single static shot of blue, held for the entire runtime, while a richly layered soundtrack by Brian Eno and a voiceover, featuring Jarman and collaborators including Tilda Swinton, unfurl reflections on his life and approaching death. The choice was not abstract: by that point, cytomegalovirus retinitis, an AIDS-related complication, had so severely damaged Jarman's vision that the world appeared to him through a haze of blue. He died six months after the film's premiere, in February 1994.
The film holds a perfect score on Rotten Tomatoes to this day and continues to be screened at major institutions on World AIDS Day. It remains one of the most radical and quietly devastating works in the queer cinema canon.
What Erdem Made
Designer Erdem Moralioglu, who is gay, was deliberate in choosing Jarman as the muse for this year's Pride piece. The long-sleeve 'Bliss' tee, created in collaboration with Gay's The Word, the UK's first and oldest queer bookstore, carries Jarman's signature and the word "BLISS," the film's original working title. The blue that runs through the design is a direct nod to the film's signature shade, a color that has been linked by art critics to Yves Klein's International Klein Blue, lending it a lineage that stretches across both queer cinema and the history of visual art.
Jarman is a perfect protagonist for our torrid times to remind us that there is always beauty amidst the chaos.
Erdem Moralioglu
Erdem also released a short film to accompany the tee, directed by David Lewis and Sara Moralioglu, drawing on rare footage and archival material from The Garden. It's the kind of accompanying context that turns a charity product into something closer to a genuine act of cultural preservation.
The tee is available now on the Erdem site, with proceeds split equally between three LGBTQ+ organizations: akt, which works to end LGBTQ+ youth homelessness; Not A Phase, a trans charity; and the Terrence Higgins Trust, the HIV and sexual health organization named after the first person in the UK recorded to have died from an AIDS-related illness, in 1982.
Why Tovey
Russell Tovey, known to queer audiences from Looking and more recently Plainclothes, fronts the campaign. The casting makes sense beyond the obvious. Tovey has spoken at length about what it meant to grow up gay during the AIDS crisis and the weight he feels to keep that history visible.
I feel a responsibility to tell these stories, to tell the legacy, the inherited trauma that we have as a community. We can't forget this.
Russell Tovey
That's not a PR talking point; it's a thread he's returned to consistently. Having him front a tribute to Jarman, one of the most fearless artists to live and work through that era, gives the collaboration a coherence that most Pride fashion partnerships lack.
Why It Matters
Pride Month produces a reliable flood of branded merchandise, much of it thin on meaning. What Erdem has done here is different in kind: the design actually requires you to know who Derek Jarman was to fully understand what you're wearing, and the accompanying short film gives you the chance to find out if you don't. That's a more ambitious ask than a rainbow logo, and a more honest one.
For anyone who wants to go deeper, Blue is currently available to stream on Hoopla, Kanopy, and Tubi. Start there, and the blue of that tee will mean something different by the time the credits roll.
Source: Queerty
Cover photo: Gary Kirk, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
