For fall, Burc Akyol embraced the power woman with a little help from goddesses past and present, from the Carthaginian Tanit—defender of wisdom and craft—to Faye Dunaway.
“I feel like women could really use the support right now,” he said backstage before the show, adding that while he wouldn’t presume to speak for women, he loves gleaning information from his entourage, mixing ideas with his own feminine side, and going from there.
Which is why some of the looks on the runway scanned autobiographical: a youth spent learning Rakass, or traditional Turkish belly dancing, with a favorite aunt on the sly—yes, he can shimmy and shake with the best of them—produced a series of black tops trimmed with jingling gold medallions at the cuffs or shoulders. Other threads in the story included a nod to ancestral craft—the opening black coat and a richly colored jersey top reprised the kilims he grew up with—and embracing his own queerness. Hence the collection’s title: “Fem.”
Folklore aside, key pieces conveyed a haughty glamour and a bougie vibe the designer described as “burc-eois.” Faux fur trimmed coats and jackets looked particularly strong, and came either cropped in gold or as a tailored black jacket with a swingy tail peeking out from the hem. The designer and his studio nicknamed that one “the dictator’s wife”; in real life, the tail will be removable. Last season’s Open Heart jacket returned as Braveheart, a sharply cut back-to-front pinstriped number with power shoulders; further along, a number of sarouel propositions in silk chiffon were intended to evoke freedom of movement. Sure, some of the clothes danced on the fringe of camp, but there were enough real-world propositions here to keep Akyol high on the list of emerging designers to know.
