News and Press

This season, the Turkish fashion industry has faced numerous challenges, ranging from the ongoing Covid-19 crisis and geopolitical conflict in neighbouring countries, to ongoing supply chain disruptions, unusually cold weather fronts halting production and the country’s economic crisis, as seen in Turkey’s financial crisis according to the UK’s Financial Times. The Times reported that inflation hit a 20-year high of 54% in March this year.
Despite these hurdles, established and emerging Turkish design talent showed tenacity and optimism at Istanbul Fashion Week this season, quickly adopting a mix of events and showcase strategies to expand and prove their global presence this season.
Physical performances at historic venues such as the Ottoman palace and the 160-year-old Crimean church return to the schedule, interspersed with interactive digital offerings, as well as newly opened exhibitions, panel discussions and pop-ups on the Bosphorus Puerto Galata.
The event organizers – Istanbul Garment Exporters Association or İHKİB, Turkish Fashion Designers Association (MTD) and Istanbul Fashion Institute (IMA) – have partnered with Istanbul Soho House to provide locals with an intimate live screening experience and visits via live broadcast industry members.International audiences can then connect online through FWI’s Digital Events Center.
In Istanbul, there was a palpable sense of new energy in the activations and screenings of physical activities as participants joined their communities in person again in climatic conditions.While some were still hesitant, a warm feeling prevailed.
“[We] miss being together,” said menswear designer Niyazi Erdoğan.”The energy is high and everyone wants to be on the show.”
Below, BoF meets 10 emerging and established designers at their Fashion Week events and events to find out how their campaigns and brand strategies have evolved in Istanbul this season.
Şansım Adalı studied in Brussels before founding Sudi Etuz.The designer, who champions a digital-first approach, is focusing more on her digital business today and downsizing her textile business.She uses virtual reality models, digital artists and artificial intelligence engineers, as well as NFT capsule collections and limited physical clothing.
Şansım Adalı hosts her exhibition at the Crimea Memorial Church near Galata in Istanbul, where her digital designs are modeled on digital avatars and displayed on an 8-foot-tall screen.After losing her father to Covid-19, she explained that it still “doesn’t feel right” to have a lot of people on a fashion show together.Instead, she utilized her digital models in smaller display spaces.
“It’s a very different experience, having a digital exhibition on an old construction site,” she told BoF.”I love the contrast. Everyone knows about this church, but no one goes in. The new generation doesn’t even know these places exist. So, I just want to see the younger generation inside and remember we have this beautiful architecture.”
The digital show accompanies the live opera performance, and the singer wears one of the few physical costumes Adal makes today — but mostly, Sudi Etuz intends to keep the digital focus.
“My future plans are just to keep the textile side of my brand small because I don’t think the world needs another brand for mass production. I focus on digital projects. I have a team of computer engineers, digital artists and clothing artists Team. My design team is Gen Z, and I try to understand them, watch them, listen to them.”
Gökay Gündoğdu moved to New York to study brand management before joining the Domus Academy in Milan in 2007.Gündoğdu worked in Italy before launching his womenswear label TAGG in 2014 – Attitude Gökay Gündoğdu.Stockists include Luisa Via Roma and his e-commerce site, which launched during the pandemic.
TAGG presents this season’s collection in the form of a digitally augmented museum exhibit: “We use QR codes and augmented reality to watch live movies coming out of wall hangings — video versions of still pictures, just like a fashion show,” Gündoğdu told BoF.
“I’m not a digital person at all,” he said, but during the pandemic, “everything we do is digital. We make our website more accessible and easier to understand. We’re in [wholesale management platform] Joor showcased the collection on 2019 and gained new and new clients in the US, Israel, Qatar, Kuwait.”
Despite his success, landing TAGG on international accounts this season has proved challenging.”International media and buyers always want to see something from us in Turkey. I don’t really use cultural elements – my aesthetic is more minimalistic,” he said.But to appeal to an international audience, Gündodu drew inspiration from Turkish palaces, mimicking its architecture and interiors with the same colours, textures and silhouettes.
The economic crisis has also affected his collections this season: “The Turkish lira is losing momentum, so everything is very expensive. Importing fabrics from abroad is busy. The government says you shouldn’t push competition between foreign fabric manufacturers and the domestic market. You have to Pay extra tax to import.” As a result, the designers mixed locally sourced fabrics with those imported from Italy and France.
Creative Director Yakup Bicer launched his brand Y Plus, a unisex brand, in 2019 after 30 years in the Turkish design industry.Y Plus debuted at London Fashion Week in February 2020.
The digital collection of Yakup Bicer’s Autumn/Winter 22-23 collection is inspired by “anonymous keyboard heroes and their defenders of crypto-anarchist ideology” and conveys the message of protecting political freedom on social media platforms.
“I want to continue [showing] for a while,” he told BoF.“As we have done in the past, bringing buyers together during fashion week is very time consuming and financially burdensome. Now we can reach all parts of the world at the same time at the touch of a button with a digital presentation .”
Beyond technology, Bicer is leveraging local production to overcome supply chain disruptions — and in doing so, hopes to deliver more sustainable practices.”We’re facing travel restrictions and now we’re at war [in the world region], so the freight issue it creates affects our entire trade. [...] By working with local production, we make sure our [jobs] are [more ] sustainable, and [we] reduced our carbon footprint.”
Ece and Ayse Ege launched their brand Dice Kayek in 1992.Previously produced in Paris, the brand joined the Fédération Française de la Couture in 1994 and was awarded the Jameel Prize III, an international award for contemporary art and design inspired by Islamic traditions, in 2013.The brand recently relocated its studio to Istanbul and has 90 dealers worldwide.
Dice Kayek’s sisters Ece and Ayse Ege have showcased their collection in fashion video this season – a digital format they are now familiar with, having been making fashion films since 2013.Open it and go back to it.It has more value.In 10 or 12 years, you can watch it again.We prefer its variety,” Ece told BoF.
Today, Dice Kayek sells internationally in Europe, the US, the Middle East and China.Through their store in Paris, they differentiated consumers’ in-store experience by using Turkish customs as an experiential retail strategy.”You can’t compete with these big brands anywhere, and there’s no use in doing that,” said Ayse, who said the brand plans to open another store in London this year.
The sisters previously ran their business from Paris before moving to Istanbul, where their studio is attached to Beaumonti’s showroom.Dice Kayek fully internalized their business and saw production become more profitable, “something we couldn’t do when we were producing in another factory.” In bringing production in-house, the sisters also hoped to Turkish craftsmanship is supported and maintained in its collection.
Niyazi Erdoğan is the founding designer of Istanbul Fashion Week 2009 and Vice-President of the Turkish Fashion Designers Association, and a lecturer at the Istanbul Fashion Academy.In addition to the menswear line, he founded the accessories brand NIYO in 2014 and won the European Museum Award in the same year.
Niyazi Erdoğan presented his menswear collection digitally this season: “We are all creating digitally now – we show in the Metaverse or NFTs. We sell the collection both digitally and physically, going in both directions. We want to prepare for the future of both,” he told BoF.
However, for next season, he said, “I think we have to have a physical show. Fashion is about society and feeling, and people like to be together. For creative people, we need this.”
During the pandemic, the brand created an online store and changed their collections to become “better-selling” online, taking into account changes in consumer demand during the pandemic.He also noticed a shift in this consumer base: “I see my menswear being sold to women as well, so there are no boundaries.”
As a lecturer at the IMA, Erdogan is constantly learning from the next generation.“For a generation like Alpha, if you’re in fashion, you have to understand them. My vision is to understand their needs, to be strategic about sustainability, digital, color, cut and shape — we have to work with They interact.”
An Istituto Marangoni graduate, Nihan Peker worked for companies such as Frankie Morello, Colmar and Furla before launching his namesake label in 2012, designing ready-to-wear, bridal and couture collections.She has exhibited at London, Paris and Milan Fashion Weeks.
Celebrating the brand’s 10th anniversary this season, Nihan Peker held a fashion show at Çırağan Palace, a former Ottoman palace converted from a hotel overlooking the Bosphorus.”It was important to me to show the collection in a place I could only dream of,” Peker told BoF.”Ten years later, I feel like I can fly more freely and exceed my limits.”
“It took me a while to prove myself in my country,” added Peker, who sat front row this season with Turkish celebrities wearing designs from her previous collections.Internationally, “things are going in the right place,” she said, with growing influence in the Middle East.
“All Turkish designers have to think about the challenges of our region from time to time. Frankly, as a country, we have to deal with bigger social and political issues, so we all lose momentum as well. My focus now is through my The ready-to-wear and haute couture collections create a new kind of wearable, manufacturable elegance.”
After graduating from Istanbul Fashion Institute in 2014, Akyuz studied for a master’s degree in Menswear Design at the Marangoni Academy in Milan.She worked for Ermenegildo Zegna and Costume National before returning to Turkey in 2016 and launching her menswear label in 2018.
In the sixth show of the season, Selen Akyuz made a film that was screened at Soho House in Istanbul and online: “It’s a movie, so it’s not really a fashion show, but I think it still works. Also emotional.”
As a small custom business, Akyuz is slowly building up a small international customer base, with customers now located in the US, Romania and Albania.”I don’t want to jump in all the time, but take it slow, step by step, and take a measured approach,” she said.”We produce everything at my dining table. There is no mass production. I do almost everything by hand” – including making t-shirts, hats, accessories and “patch, leftover” bags to promote more Ongoing design practice.
This scaled-down approach extends to her production partners.”Instead of working with big manufacturers, I’ve been looking for smaller local tailors to support my brand, but it’s been hard to find qualified candidates. Artisans using traditional techniques are hard to find – uptake of next generation workers limited.
Gökhan Yavaş graduated from DEU Fine Arts Textile and Fashion Design in 2012 and studied at IMA before launching his own street menswear label in 2017.The brand is currently working with companies such as DHL.
This season, Gökhan Yavaş presents a short video and a fashion show – his first in three years.“We really miss it – it’s time to talk to people again. We want to keep doing physical fashion shows because on Instagram, it’s getting harder and harder to communicate. It’s more about meeting up and hearing from people face-to-face ,”designer says.
The brand is updating its production concept.”We’ve stopped using genuine leather and genuine leather,” he explained, explaining that the first three looks of the collection were cobbled together from scarves made in earlier collections.Yavaş is also about to collaborate with DHL to design a raincoat to sell to environmental charities.
The sustainability focus has proven challenging for brands, with the first hurdle being finding more millet fabrics from suppliers.“You have to order at least 15 meters of fabric from your suppliers, and that’s the biggest challenge for us.” The second challenge they face is opening a store in Turkey to sell menswear, while local buyers focus on Turkish womenswear designs division.Still, while the brand sells through their website and international stores in Canada and London, their next focus is Asia – specifically Korea and China.
Wearable art brand Bashaques was founded in 2014 by Başak Cankeş.The brand sells swimwear and kimonos themed with its artwork.
“Normally, I do performance art collaborations with wearable art pieces,” creative director Başak Cankeş told BoF shortly after presenting her latest collection in a 45-minute documentary screening at Soho House in Istanbul.
The exhibition tells the story of her travels to Peru and Colombia to work with their artisans, adopting Anatolian patterns and symbols, and “asking them how they felt about Anatolian [prints]“.Drawing on the shared cultural heritage of shamanism, the series explores common craft practices between Asian Turkish Anatolia and South American countries.
“About 60 percent of the collection is just one piece, all hand-woven by women in Peru and Anatolia,” she says.
Cankeş sells to art collectors in Turkey and wants some clients to make museum collections from her work, explaining that she is “not interested in being a global brand because it’s hard to be a global and sustainable brand. I Don’t even want to do any collection of 10 pieces other than swimsuits or kimonos. It’s a whole conceptual, mutable art collection that we’ll put on NFTs as well. I see myself more as an artist, and Not a fashion designer.”
The Karma Collective represents the emerging talent of Istanbul Moda Academy, established in 2007, offering degrees in Fashion Design, Technology and Product Development, Fashion Management, and Fashion Communication and Media.
“The main problem I have is the weather conditions, because it has been snowing for the past two weeks, so we also have a lot of problems with the supply chain and sourcing fabrics,” Hakalmaz told BoF.She created the collection in just two weeks for her label Alter Ego, presented as part of the Karma collective, and also designed for fashion house Nocturne.
Hakalmaz is also no longer using technological solutions to support her production process, saying: “I don’t like using technology and stay away from it as much as possible because I’d rather do handcraft to keep in touch with the past.”