Beauty, Pain, Tension and Sensuality Are Key to Dilara Fındıkoğlu's FW23 Masterclass
Daring showgoers — such as Lisa Rinna and U.K. drag icon Bimini Bon Boulash — to feel the designer’s emotions and express their own.
Turkish-born Dilara Fındıkoğlu plays with your emotions. She pulls on your heartstrings, makes you feel her pain, and conjures an intensity that makes you feel what she’s portraying in front of you. For Fall/Winter 2023, the designer took to a chapel in East London to display her latest collection as part of London Fashion Week, and it was nothing short of a masterclass in how to draw an audience in.
For SS23, Fındıkoğlu served a skin-crawlingly tense and atmospheric display of sex and struggles to the soundtrack of stilettos hitting wooden floorboards. This season, the designer added the drama of a dripping tap, somewhat mixing a sense of solemnness and sensuality together.
That’s because while so much of the collection explored sexual tensions (and a pain related to this), there was also Fındıkoğlu’s usual amount of fetishization on display. Latex tights clashed with leather bursting at the seams, tightened together with clips and metal fastenings that intended to make us feel awkward. Likewise, models dropping their demure coverings revealed boned corsets and lingerie dripping in crystals, subverting opulence with the idea of something voyeuristic or as if we weren’t meant to see it, but were being dared to.
Fındıkoğlu’s collections are impossible to not become fixated upon. Models stare into the eyes of the crowd, the heels hit the stone with a sharp sensuality, and performances of others clinging to walls or having a moment to themselves once again draw you in, but in a way that implies we shouldn’t be looking. This is Fındıkoğlu’s power, expressed through looks that also give her power.
One, for example, was a dress made from black feathers à la Black Swan, while the closing look that saw a black satin dress covered in butter knives that curved around the breast and sculpted the hips alluded to finding one’s strength, as if the dress was Fındıkoğlu’s shield.
Take a look at the incomparable Dilara Fındıkoğlu collection for FW23 above, and find more London Fashion Week FW23 content across Hypebeast.
For equally impactful shows, check out the latest from FEBEN.
