Notes on the Making of Hasbahçe
Hasbahçe began long before the first silhouette was drawn. Not simply with the beauty of a garden, but with its order, its rhythm, what it conceals, and the traces it leaves behind. Research into Ottoman gardens, architectural details, colour and botanical forms gradually came together on the first moodboard. The intention, however, was never to reconstruct an image from the past.
It was to find a way of carrying the feeling of a garden without turning it into a literal garment.
BEFORE THE LINE
The first sketches emerged around this thought. A structure beginning at the shoulder. A volume moving away from the body. A line altered by movement.
Some ideas remained close to their first form. Others changed the moment they met fabric. Some never entered the collection at all.Because the language of Hasbahçe was shaped not only by what was kept, but also by what was left behind.
ON WATER
Another trace of Hasbahçe appeared not on paper, but on water.
A work created especially for the collection by master ebru artist Hikmet Barutçugil introduced a different kind of gesture: fluid, shifting, guided by the hand yet never entirely controlled.
Here, art was not an ornament added to the collection afterwards.
It became part of the act of making itself.
One part of the garden could be drawn.
Another had to be allowed to find its own form.
WHEN FORM EMERGED
When the sketches met silk, the authority of the line began to loosen.
Taffeta amplified volume. Chiffon made it almost disappear. Proportions shifted, details were removed, and silhouettes were rebuilt.
Within our atelier, fitting after fitting, the collection gradually said less - but what remained became more precise.
Pins disappeared. Lines became quieter. Excess fell away.
An idea slowly became form.
FINDING ITS WORLD
Yet Hasbahçe was never only about the clothes. The light, architecture and nature surrounding them had to belong to the same world. The search eventually led to Marrakech. With its colour, gardens, water and the way light settles across its surfaces, the city did not explain the collection.
It completed it.
When the right faces and the right movement entered the frame, what had lived for months in research, sketches, silk and the atelier became visible as a whole.
WHEN THE GARDEN BLOOMED
By the time Hasbahçe stood before the camera, the moodboard had disappeared from view. So had the first sketches, the fittings, the pins, the altered proportions and the ideas that had been abandoned along the way.
Only their traces remained. A collection rarely begins where it is finally seen. Sometimes it begins much earlier - in a reference, a line, a movement on water, or an idea that has not yet found its name.
Hasbahçe began as a thought.
Then, slowly, it found its own world.