The Turkish Signature at London Fashion Week: Three Designers, Three Visions, One Dominant Presence

London Fashion Week Autumn/Winter 2026 ran from 19 to 23 February, drawing King Charles to the opening ceremony and placing British fashion — and its extraordinary Turkish-origin talent — back at the centre of the global conversation. Dilara Fındıkoğlu, Bora Aksu, and ERDEM each brought something irreplaceable. TBMag reviews the shows and the stories behind them.

There is a particular quality to the Turkish presence at London Fashion Week that resists easy summary. It is not a school, not a movement, not a shared aesthetic. Dilara Fındıkoğlu, Bora Aksu, and Erdem Moralıoğlu do not make similar clothes, do not share references, do not occupy the same corner of the fashion world. What they share is something subtler: the quality of having arrived in London carrying a cultural inheritance that British fashion did not previously have, and having built, from that inheritance, practices that are now indisputably central to what makes the city’s fashion week worth attending.

London Fashion Week AW26 opened on 19 February 2026 with a ceremony attended by King Charles — a marker of the event’s cultural significance in a post-Brexit Britain that is, more than ever, conscious of the soft power its creative industries represent. Over five days, from the BFC show spaces to Ironmongers’ Hall and the Royal Horticultural Halls, fifty-plus designers presented their visions for the coming season. The three Turkish-heritage names among them — Fındıkoğlu, Aksu, ERDEM — were, by the consensus of the international fashion press, among the week’s most talked-about shows.

Dilara Fındıkoğlu — ‘Cage of Innocence’

On a Sunday evening in February, something unusual happened in the precincts of Ironmongers’ Hall, a private mansion-house in the City of London. More than an hour before the show was scheduled to begin, crowds of black-clad young people were massing outside — some in queue, some simply drawn by the energy — in sufficient numbers that local residents were stopping passers-by to ask: ‘who are all these well-dressed people, and where are they going?’ For those who know Dilara Fındıkoğlu’s trajectory, the scene was not surprising. It was the logical consequence of a decade of uncompromising work.

The collection, titled ‘Cage of Innocence’, is the most personal and most resolved statement Fındıkoğlu has yet made. The conceptual premise is autobiographical: an exploration of the confinement imposed on women through the codes of innocence and purity — the white dress, the village girl, the expectation of submission — and the violence, beauty, and exhilaration of escaping it. The show dedicated the collection to all women ‘who were never allowed to express what they think or feel.’ In Fındıkoğlu’s own words: ‘I have been trying to heal my ancestral trauma. I have been remembering all of the women from my past who never had freedom and who were put in cages of innocence.’

Istanbul-born, she moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins — a decision for which her brother stopped speaking to her for ten years, believing that a woman should not be free to go to a different country, or even to go out to dinner by herself. The collection is, in part, a reckoning with that history: not as bitterness but as catharsis. ‘This collection is my goodbye,’ she said, ‘accepting and sending love to them, and then probably the first girl to be this free from my whole ancestral line.’

“I want to be a game changer for how women with similar backgrounds to me are seen in the world. This collection is about giving freedom to my ancestors and anyone who never had freedom.”

The clothes themselves carry the argument with extraordinary precision. White gowns slashed and deconstructed, corsetry that simultaneously constrains and armours, Turkish metal jewellery from Istanbul’s bazaars morphed into warrior headpieces, models wearing horse bits — a figure of both domestication and, in Fındıkoğlu’s inversion, defiant power. Julia Fox was in the audience. So were Susie Cave, Lara Stone, Bobby Gillespie, and Vivienne Westwood’s granddaughter Cora Corrie. The Vogue Hong Kong review called it ‘the see and be seen show of London Fashion Week.’ Metal Magazine described it as ‘a powerful, uncompromising fashion statement that carries weight — heritage, gender politics, personal history — and uses clothes as both armour and confession.’

Alongside the art, there is now serious commercial momentum. Fındıkoğlu is expanding: new handbag categories launching this season in three styles, more ready-to-wear alongside the couture, wholesale accounts at H.Lorenzo, Antonioli, SSENSE, and availability at Selfridges and Dover Street Market. She has been worn by Cate Blanchett, Kim Kardashian, and Kylie Jenner. She collaborated with John Galliano on his last show at Maison Margiela. ‘I want to create a Dilara empire,’ she said — with the kind of calm certainty that, after a decade of this work, you believe entirely.

Bora Aksu — The Quiet Revolutionary

Where Fındıkoğlu operates at maximum voltage — theatrical, confrontational, deliberately overwhelming — Bora Aksu works in a register of sustained, intricate, almost private beauty. His is the fashion of the long view: twenty-plus years of showing at London Fashion Week since his graduate collection in 2003, each season building on a practice so consistent and so refined that the word ‘romantic’ no longer captures it fully. What Aksu makes is closer to a sustained argument — made in lace and needlework and the most delicate of handcrafted textiles — about what femininity can mean when it is neither simplified nor sentimentalised.

Aksu was born in Turkey and moved to London to study at Central Saint Martins — a founding institutional connection that links him to Fındıkoğlu and, in an earlier generation, to Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. He is, as Fashion Week Online has noted, a ‘BFC Fashion Trust recipient’ whose relationship with British fashion’s institutional support structures has been long and productive. But the source of his work is consistently, explicitly Turkish: each season, he travels back to Turkey to source and commission the handcrafted laces, needlework, and crochets that his London collections are built around.

His own description of why he returns is worth quoting directly: ‘In Turkey, every household will have someone with amazing handcraft skills. It could be crochet, needlework, knitting or weaving, but these skills never disappoint. I always take these craft elements and turn them into something different.’ And then: ‘Turkey has the most amazing layers of different cultural and historical backgrounds. It’s always been an inspirational source for creative people.’ This is not nostalgia. It is a description of a living craft tradition that Aksu is actively sustaining — using his position at the centre of British fashion to create markets for skills that might otherwise disappear.

“Turkey has the most amazing layers of different cultural and historical backgrounds. It’s always been an inspirational source for creative people.”

The AW26 collection continued in this vein: ethereal silhouettes in layered textiles, the characteristic palette of muted pastels and creams, historical references worn lightly. Fashion Week Online placed his Friday afternoon show as one of ‘the week’s most notable for bringing ethereal sensitivity’ to the programme. For international buyers and press who have followed Aksu for two decades, each new collection is less a surprise than a deepening — evidence that a singular vision, maintained with patience and craft, is its own form of radicalism.

ERDEM — Romance as a Serious Intellectual Position

Erdem Moralıoğlu occupies the most established position in the trio: ERDEM is the label that has, over the past fifteen years, made the most confident case for the proposition that romantic femininity — historically marginalised in serious fashion discourse as decorative rather than intellectual — is in fact a sophisticated and politically resonant aesthetic position. The brand holds one of the most coveted Sunday slots in the LFW schedule, drawing international press, buyers, and celebrities to presentations that are consistently among the week’s most fully realised.

Moralıoğlu was born in Montreal to a Turkish father and British mother — a bilingual, bicultural origin that he has drawn on throughout his career. He studied at the Royal College of Art, launched ERDEM in 2005, and has since built a label whose signature is the interplay of extraordinary archive-sourced printed fabrics with precise tailoring and a recurring cast of historical female figures. His collections frequently reference specific women from history: scientists, poets, artists, rebels — women whose contribution to culture was marginalised or erased, and whose reclamation through fashion is both a statement and a gesture of repair.

The AW26 ERDEM collection continued this trajectory with the fabric work and historical depth that the brand’s most loyal admirers have come to regard as its defining quality. Fashion Week Online describes the brand’s shows as moments when ‘fashion editors praise ERDEM for mixing romantic stories with modern design ideas’ — a description that undersells the precision of the intellectual work involved, but captures the emotional register accurately. ERDEM does not ask to be regarded as political in the manner of Fındıkoğlu’s confrontational feminism. It makes its argument more quietly, and perhaps more durably: by making extraordinary clothes for women, about women, and in tribute to women, with a consistency that has not wavered in twenty years.

Three Designers, One Argument

Taken together, the LFW AW26 showings of Fındıkoğlu, Aksu, and ERDEM make an argument that is more than the sum of its parts. They represent three different generations of Turkish creative talent making work at the highest level of British fashion — and they do so from positions so distinct that their shared heritage becomes, paradoxically, evidence of its richness rather than its uniformity.

Fındıkoğlu’s work carries the heat of unresolved personal history — the specific experience of a Turkish woman from a conservative family who chose, at significant cost, to build her creative life in London, and who has been translating that choice into extraordinary clothes for a decade. Aksu’s work is cooler, more patient, sustained by a relationship with Turkish craft traditions that has deepened over two decades rather than exhausted itself. Erdem’s work is the most international in its sensibility — drawing on a Turkish-British dual heritage that, in the context of a UK-Turkey relationship undergoing its own significant reconfiguration, carries its own kind of timely resonance.

None of them makes Turkish fashion. All of them make fashion that would not exist in its current form without Turkey. The distinction matters — and London Fashion Week, which opened this year with a royal ceremony and closed with a programme that included all three, is the better for understanding it.

LFW and the Broader British Fashion Economy

The week itself — 19 to 23 February 2026 — took place against a backdrop that the British Fashion Council was visibly determined to address: the ongoing pressure on independent British labels following the 2024 closure of MatchesFashion, which had been a critical retail partner for precisely the kind of mid-luxury, directional brands that make London Fashion Week distinctive. The loss was significant, and its effects — reduced wholesale revenue, greater dependence on direct-to-consumer sales — were still being felt across the LFW designer community.

Fındıkoğlu’s commercial expansion — new categories, new wholesale accounts, a stated ambition for flagship stores in London, Paris, and Venice — is partly a response to this context: a recognition that artistic integrity and commercial sustainability are not opposites, and that the lesson of the last few years is the importance of diversifying revenue beyond any single channel. Her approach — ‘commercialising in a Dilara way, keeping my couture and arty pieces, but wanting to connect to more people’ — is a template that other LFW designers are watching closely.

For TBMag’s readers — whether they follow fashion closely or attend primarily for the cultural and business intelligence that London Fashion Week generates — the Turkish presence at AW26 is a reminder of something that the bilateral relationship between Britain and Turkey tends to make visible in every creative field: that the most interesting work often emerges from the threshold between two cultures, two histories, two sets of expectations. Fındıkoğlu’s cage. Aksu’s lace. Erdem’s archive. Each is a different way of saying the same thing: that the distance between Istanbul and London, navigated honestly, produces something that neither city could produce alone.

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