Not long ago, Bora Aksu found himself roaming the corridors of the George Dragon—an 18th-century coaching inn turned guesthouse in Buckinghamshire—on the hunt for his next muse. She was a barmaid named Sukie, who worked there 200 years ago. According to local legend she had many admirers, including a handsome aristocrat who occasionally passed through the village. One evening, Sukie received what she believed to be a letter from that nobleman, proposing an elopement at the nearby Hellfire Caves. But when she arrived, dressed in bridal whites, she was instead ambushed by three local boys, drunk and jealous, who chased her further underground with stones. Her body was discovered the following morning at the door of the guesthouse, where reports of her creaking the floorboards still circulate today.
In truth, there is no trod-upon woman of yore that Aksu will not haunt for inspiration. He has previously cleaved from the troubled stories of Sissi of Austria, the German artist Eva Hesse, and the Dutch society icon Mathilde Willink, seeking to confer in death a dignity they were perhaps withheld in life. But this time “there were no photos, no documentation or evidence that I could search for,” Aksu said during a walkthrough of his fall 2026 collection in his east London studio. “Which meant there was a lot of space to create my own version of her reality.” He did so in two acts. The first imagined Sukie as she might have been, with models parading through St Paul’s Church in Covent Garden wearing Aksu’s idea of a rough-and-ready working wardrobe of the time: crystal-embellished short suits; check wool skirt-trousers with impractically sheer legs; ribbon-tied velvet puffers worn with crochet skirt sets; and tailored martial jackets that lent an unexpectedly rugged timbre to the typically whimsical mood.
Things grew a little hokier in the second act, as an Alison Sudol-fronted chorus began to yelp and scream from the rostrum at the altar, and Aksu summoned Sukie in her most spectral form. Gossamer capelets hovered over belted bouclé blazers, as if a hand was curling around the shoulders;ruffled polka-dot gowns and puff-sleeve saloon dresses were topped with ghostly outer layers of lace. Black spaghetti-strapped dresses bloomed with blood-red crochet poppies; pale-pink blossoms snarled toward the neckline on tiered frocks of transparent tulle; and a closing suite of ivory silk organza and lace gowns accumulated clusters of orchid appliqués.
The whole thing culminated in a bridal look with white roses caught in its veil: the dress that contemporary ghost hunters claim to have seen Sukie wearing. But what about Aksu: did the designer have a supernatural encounter of his own? “Oh, I’m glad I didn’t,” he said with a laugh. “I don’t think I’m ready to see the afterlife just yet.”
