A rose is a rose is a rose—though not in Burc Akyol’s hands. Instead, that flower becomes a metaphor for resistance, rebellion and hope as well as ephemeral joys—pride, passion, dance and sex among them.
The Franco-Turkish designer titled his spring outing “Gülistan,” Persian for “land of roses.” It was a very personal meditation on “kindling some love,” cultivating openness and welcoming “otherness” as filtered through clothing.
Backstage before the show, Akyol explained that he prefers the French word “évident” to the ubiquitous “minimalism” because “these are clothes that feel like they’ve belonged to you forever, like a signature. It’s what you start with when you start dressing up,” he said. A case in point: look 20 here, a lace minidress slipped under a billowing leather trench—the top a bomber zipped to a sweeping bottom half. It was a present-day iteration of a coat-and-cycling-shorts look he once put together for his first day of high school. “I felt powerful, like nothing could stop me,” he recalled of that look, which he also reprised prettily for evening in chocolate triple silk gazar, paired with a black bustier dress trimmed with burnished gold fabric and dangly earrings that were in fact real rosebuds his team spray-painted in gold.
Akyol credits his time in the studios of exuberant mentors like John Galliano at Dior in the late aughts and Esteban Cortázar with teaching him to grasp the power of transcribing emotion into clothing. “Their briefs were just alive,” he said. Free-associating childhood memories of Romani children who appeared in his classroom, the vibrant communities he encountered in Istanbul’s Sulukule neighborhood, and his dance background—this season, flamenco was highlighted—produced some striking ideas. The best of these drew on his tailoring chops, notably in the opening series of evening suits with scarf-like panels on the jackets and trousers that could be cinched around the waist or left to trail freely. But even some of the more improbable looks (the flounce-back trousers come to mind) had something beguiling about the way they moved, though some seemed more runway than reality.
Speaking of real-life dressing, interspersed throughout were staple pieces —blouses, sweaters, tuxedo denims—restyled and brought back to the fore from earlier collections, part of a partnership with eBay’s Endless Runway initiative to support circularity. “It’s important to me that we gather staple pieces that are still in my wardrobe, and to show that they live on and retain value,” the designer said. “That is why I love doing what I do.” It shouldn’t take Akyol’s fans long to determine which of these pieces they’ll want to carry with them into spring and beyond.
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