February 19, 2024 |
It wasn’t a fashion show, it was a manifesto, delivered by Dilara Findikoglu with a roar of femme energy, designed to snuff out the male gaze and trample the patriarchy under its (very high) heel and leave it for dust.
Speaking after the show, held in a soaring church in Shoreditch, the designer said this: “It’s about toxic masculinity – and being beyond it: I feel like tonight we are doing a mass ritual to end it. The collection is called Femme Vortex because I wanted to create a different reality, outside politics, borders, gender norms, any kind of systematic rules that have been created by hetero-patriarchal men. My previous collections were about fighting, about resistance. But I’m not fighting any more: I wanted to express divine feminine power somewhere beyond time, beyond reality, and beyond what is happening.”
Her clothes celebrate the feminine: cupping, cinching, curving over the body. The collection was rooted in the language of empowered femininity and desire, with a slice of S&M.
Corset lacing, cinched leather skirts, jeans and teeny-tiny hot pants; waspies, snatched waists; tight, pinstripe tailoring and white shirting were worn in disarray, in total disregard for convention and formal office rules. Elsewhere football tops were feminised with corset lacing. The looks were all named (‘Fragile Ego’, ‘Question of Time’, ‘Waking the Witch’) and each was accessorised with latex opera gloves and lucite mules. One model carried a newspaper with the headline “OMG Dilara Is Doing a Satanic Orgy at a London Church.”
From the minute Hari Nef opened the show it was clear that you don’t just wear a Dilara look. You inhabit it. Each of model seemed to summon something from within. That was thanks, in part to movement director Pat Boguslawsk, who directed the viral posing at Maison Margiela’s extraordinary Artisanal show and is elevating catwalk modelling to the level of performance art. It was a show to remember.
Photography courtesy of Dilara Findikoglu.
