Dilara Findikoglu marked her much-anticipated return with Venus in Chaos, her Fall/Winter 2025 collection — a mythological pilgrimage rendered in sculptural corsetry, leather tattooed by hand, and a tempest of hair, metal, and pearl. Taking place in Electrowerkz, a former 19th-century warehouse, used for raves, fetish nights, and now underground fashion, the show presents Venus reimagined, trailing locks of red hair and a metallic glint of her own mythology. “They say that women are from Venus, and so, in an act of spiritual rapture, to Venus, we return,” Findikoglu notes.
If Findikoglu’s work has always been about reconstructing femininity as something both ethereal and threatening, Venus in Chaos furthers this dialectic. The collection unfolds as a pre-Raphaelite odyssey, enmeshing medieval armoury with contemporary defiance. Lara Stone opens the show in a black corseted snakeskin leather, setting the tone for a procession of figures who seem to belong both to the past and the future — Botticelli’s Venus, reconfigured, now donning corsets spun entirely from human hair, pearl-choked necklines, and the draped rave-worn relics. Low-rise denim and threaded leather jeans ground the collection in the contemporary, as models stride forward carrying their dirtied trainers by the straps.
Elsewhere, Boticellian red locks cascade, tangled into mesh veils or woven into silver Victorian-style lockets that loop over the ears, an allusion to both saintly relics and modern-day headphones. One look recalls Gregor Erhart’s Sainte Marie-Madeleine (c. 1515-1520) — the long-haired ascetic, reborn. But here, the barefoot mystic wears bedazzled, low-cut trainers pinned together with threads of hair, a hybrid of medieval devotion and club-kid survival.
The final look featured a leather moulded dress, inscribed with red cyber sigils. The dress, meticulously moulded by Whitaker Malem – the renowned Dalston-based duo known for their sculptural leatherwork – and tattooed by London-based artist Jonah Slater, recalls both the hard armoury dragon fighting knights, alongside the dragon itself, red, seething and stitched in leather. Dilara’s collection at large embodies this tension between armour and skin: a fusion of ancient mysticism and futurism.
Findikoglu’s show notes plastered backstage, offering glimpses of her vision: “Medieval rockstar,” “moody but ethereal,” “don’t give a fuck but hypnotic.” If Venus in Chaos is a return, it is not one of submission but rebellion. Against the rigid binaries imposed on femininity – angel or whore, Madonna or rockstar, muse or martyr – Findikoglu disengages entirely. “Rather than fight to dismantle this agenda, for now, we disengage and define our own,” she notes. “Rather than look outside to find a world that actualises our full potential, we discover it within.”
The result is a collection where sculptural corsetry binds like serpentine second skin, where tattooed leather whispers secrets from the underground, and where hair – both weapon and ornament – glistens in tinselled locks. Venus returns not to be worshipped but to lay claim, to stand at the threshold between myth and rebellion, more metallic and ethereal than ever, striding solo laces and pearls in hand: in Goethe’s words, “The soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.”
