What a wild scene erupted around Dilara Findikoglu on a quiet Sunday night in the city of London. A good hour before the appointed time of her show, so many black-clad young people were massing on the ancient Ironmonger’s Hall that stunned locals were stopping passers-by to ask, “who are all these well-dressed people, and where are they going?”
Everyone wants to know Dilara now. Inside, a packed audience of goths and rockers assembled: Susie Cave, Princess Julia, Lara Stone, Bobby Gillespie and his sons Wolf and Lux, and Vivienne Westwood’s granddaughter Cora Corrie among many more. And anyone who couldn’t get in had an invitation to a free Watch Night in a pub nearby, thrown by Lyas and the British Fashion Council. Crowds turned up.
Something has happened to ignite Dilara’s reputation far and wide since her sensational last show, Venus from Chaos, which was held in London’s dilapidated longest-running Goth club, Slimelight. It’s surely had something to do with the little matter of Cate Blanchett, Kim Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner wearing her. Findikoglu’s work is hyper-sexy and hyper-sensational but she should never be dismissed an overnight hype. She’s been honing the refinement of her corsetry techniques, her wild ways with embellishment, and most of all her own particular feminist embrace of sexuality, since she graduated CSM in 2015.
Like all British designers who matter, she uses her work is a medium for saying something fearless and authentic, and with this show, she was telling a very personal story. “My collection is called Cage of Innocence,” she said. “It’s about giving freedom to my ancestors and anyone who never had freedom. I feel like women have been kept in cages of innocence and purity, being told they have to be clean and represent virginity, all this kind of stuff, but we come out of this cage today.”
First of all, there was an excrutiating sound of stomping and rattling of chains, then maybe a key turning. The first few looks were in white, draped over corseting—beautiful at first sight, but then showing troubling signs of tension and constriction. Limbs and faces were streaked with dirt. Yellow latex smothered layers of lace lingerie. The models—putting in a passionate, stalking performance—seemed in a trance-like state, disturbed, dressed in fragments of falling-apart lingerie. In her disarray, one carried an open handbag, its contents threatening to spill out.
Findikoglu is Turkish, from a conservative family. When she came to London to study, she found herself and her people in the Goth scene around Camden and the clubs of East London. “It was a playground of freedom to me.” The autobiographical symbolism behind the collection is a fantasy catharisis of what she went through. In her mind, the character in the show begins “as a girl in the village, being suffocated by the white dress. Then she escapes, puts on man’s clothes, finds a horse, escapes. And at the end, she disconnects from everything real, and then she just becomes another creature, and because she escaped with a horse, then she becomes it.”
She used Turkish metal jewelry—“I bought it in my favorite bazaar in Istanbul,” she said—to cover faces, but then morphed it, warrior-like, into a sense of armored female strength. By the time her girl had met her horse, the metaphor was galloping towards fetish, literally with a bit between her teeth, and eventually morphing into a full leather harness-corset with a horsetail swishing behind.
“What I create is literally a big part of me,” Findikoglu said. ”It comes from my soul sometimes, when I make something. It’s like, if I can’t explain something with words, I can through the garment.” Her kind of liberation—extreme and outrageous as it seems—contains empathy for where she comes from, as well as a release from it. “Because I like feel this everyday, even though I look like the most confident person in the world, I actually am really emotional and insecure, and I feel the guilt that doesn’t belong to me,” she said. “So, it’s about also balancing toughness and softness all together. This collection is about giving voice to women that never actually have had it, and for me to heal from my ancestral burden. This collection is my, like, goodbye, accepting and sending love to them, and then probably [I’m] the first girl to be this free from my whole ancestral line.”
