I meet Dilara Findikoglu in a sleepy café on Hackney’s Broadway Market. Surrounded by people buried in their laptops, the 34-year-old designer looks like she’s fallen to earth from a place of euphoric fashion fantasy. She’s clad in a lavender coat that cocoons her frame, form-hugging leather trousers and Tom Ford glasses that take up half of her face. She’s just got back from Berlin, where she’s been making music with DJs and fellow Turkish creatives Bashkka and Sedef Adasï. Both regularly spin at Berghain and created the thumping, ballroom-inspired soundtrack to Findikoglu’s explosive AW24 show, staged inside a vast church in Shoreditch. The designer set out to create her alternative reality: one not poisoned with toxic masculinity, rigid gender norms and political upheavals. “I’m a storyteller, I can’t escape that,” she says, “though this season, I just didn’t want to talk about the politics because I feel like the more energy I give them, the more I make them exist.” Her ultra-feminine, patriarchy-squashing designs not only empower their wearer, but offer transcendental bliss. “Rather than being triggered by everything men do to me, I decided to make a collection where all their shittiness doesn’t exist, [and instead we have] our own feminine reality.”

Findikoglu’s ferocious cast of otherworldly creatures came clad in BDSM-infused leather dresses, meticulously cut using Victorian scissors before being threaded together in skintight formations. There was also cinched-in, pinstripe tailoring, barely-there hot pants and football shirts with corseted lacing and cone-bra finishings. “When I was trying to destroy masculinity with this collection, I was thinking about my macho older brothers who used to take me to football when I was a teenager to turn me into a tomboy so I wouldn’t have boyfriends,” she says. She felt shocked after watching David Beckham’s Netflix docuseries about how angry football fans can get over the smallest of errors from players on the pitch. “Within this world that I was trying to create, I had to destroy the hooligans too.”

Her clothes are like armour when she tackles the “systematic rules created by hetero-patriarchal men”. She’d read Grayson Perry’s The Descent of Man. “He talks about how we’ve raised boys in the wrong way and how we have to change how we educate men.” She crafted a look dubbed Dressing for CCTV that drew on the tracksuits that inner-city teens wear as shields. “Men grow up in environments where they have to prove their masculinity and never show vulnerability.”

Working with movement director Pat Boguslawski, the brains behind the viral choreography of Maison Margiela Artisanal’s 2024 show, her cast stalked the catwalk with vampiric flair. She’s been working with Boguslawski for three seasons, the first of which was in a dilapidated West London townhouse where no music was played, the only soundtrack being sky-high heels creaking across broken floorboards. “I never give Pat any briefs, only, ‘Can you please tone it down?’” she says with a laugh.

In her AW24 show, one model carried a newspaper emblazoned with the headline “OMG Dilara Is Doing a Satanic Orgy at a London Church”, an actual soundbite from an episode of far-right podcast InfoWars that responded to the designer’s SS18 show. Findikoglu has never been short of scrutiny. When Doja Cat fake-tatted the designer’s name onto her forehead when she wore one of her sheer, corseted frocks to the Grammys earlier this year, Turkey’s religious media outlets claimed the designer was part of the Illuminati and laces her clothes with black magic. “I just love it when people really misinterpret my designs. Some of the things written about me make me laugh,” says Findikoglu, who has been labelled a Satanist since she was in high school. “I have been a bit scandalous with my work, haven’t I? But you know, well-behaved girls never made history.”

Her main objective is to make her customer feel powerful, often communicated through the language of corsetry. “I love wearing them. I have a curvy body and like to enhance it,” she says. “Even when I was at university, I always loved the idea of wearing underwear as outerwear.” (She graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2015, where in response to not making the cut for the degree fashion show, she staged her own guerrilla-style catwalk outside the revered arts and design school.) “I’ve seen people comment on my collections saying they’re not feminist enough because the girls are in stripper heels and fetishwear. You know what I say? Leave the woman alone, let her do what she wants. Let me do whatever the fuck I want.”

Findikoglu’s fearless approach has become a go-to on the red carpet, whether she’s dressing Chloë Sevigny, who wore a deconstructed, Victorian-style frock at this year’s Met Gala, or the likes of Margot Robbie and Hari Nef, who donned her clothes for the Barbie press junket – a real pinch-me moment for the designer. She’s been an avid Barbie collector since she was a child and transformed her entire bedroom into a Barbie Dreamhouse, where she created clothes for her prized possessions and began building her own Dilara world.

It’s a world that shows no limits, as the designer excitingly muses on her desires to grow her business into shoes, furniture, even beauty – “I want to make something very Marlene Dietrich, or Queen Elizabeth,” she says. Before all that, though, she’s got a slew of exciting collaborations to come and plenty more divine femininity to project into the world.

dilarafindikoglu.com

Photographer CLARK FRANKLYN
Fashion Editor GARTH ALLDAY SPENCER
Models WENLI ZHAO at Next Models, HAVANA OLIVER-MIGHTEN at Established Models, BELLE VANDERKLEY at Premier Models and LEONIE STEFFEN at Present Models
Hair TOMI ROPPONGI at Julian Watson Agency using Bed Head by TIGI
Make-up SUNAO TAKAHASHI at Saint Luke using DIOR Foundation and Capture Totale Le Sérum
Manicurist SASHA GODDARD at Saint Luke Artists using CHANEL Le Vernis in Ballerina and Incendiaire and CHANEL La Crème Main
Photographer’s assistants STEFAN EBELEWICZ and MARIJA VAINILAVICIUTE
Fashion assistants GEORGIA EDWARDS, SONYA MAZURYK, DONNA CHOI and HAMZA KHAN
Hair assistant ERIKA KIMURA
Make-up assistant FRANCESCA LEACH
Casting ISA ROSE CONROY
Production ZAC APOSTOLOU