Burc Akyol SS27: Getting Drunk on Discipline

One speaks of infancy, nourishment, and something almost primitive; the other arrives with ritual, adulthood, pleasure, and intoxication. Between those two states, Burc Akyol builds a whole wardrobe.

Presented at Espace Commines during Paris Fashion Week, the collection arrived after an unusually intense period for the designer. The previous six months had taken Akyol through Cairo, Luxor, Tokyo, and Pantelleria, while personal loss complicated that constant movement. SS27 absorbs those experiences without turning the runway into a travel diary. Egyptian tombs, Cairo at night, Turkish cabaret, family memory, and Mediterranean heat pass through the clothes as atmosphere, proportion, and gesture.

The collection is called Milk and Wine, but what Burc Akyol is really serving is elasticity.

Between Milk and Wine

Akyol approached milk as something ancestral, maternal and bodily, with associations extending toward Mesopotamia and early human nourishment. Wine belongs to another register: fermentation, ritual, religion, ceremony, adulthood and manufactured pleasure.

The tension provides an unusually productive frame for Burc Akyol.

His fashion has always lived between discipline and exposure. Tailoring establishes authority while cutouts, plunging fronts, and transparent fabrics keep that authority physically vulnerable. SS27 formalizes the relationship more clearly. Roughly half of the collection moves through tailoring, while the other half leans toward flou, draping, and stretch.

References remain dense underneath that clarity. Man Ray and Adrienne Fidelin sit somewhere in the visual memory alongside pharaonic wigs, silver sarcophagi, Akyol’s grandmother, Turkish cabaret singer imagery, and Bülent Ersoy. Pantelleria, an island that has repeatedly appeared in his creative vocabulary, returns through another kind of bodily memory: sun, heat, bare skin, salt, and dressing for movement.

Jersey carries much of the collection’s intelligence. Akyol has described elasticity as central to the way contemporary people move between roles, environments and expectations. SS27 makes that idea physical. Stretch tailoring sits close to the body while retaining the visual authority of suiting. Unitards behave almost like second skin. Stirrup constructions extend the leg. Draping moves around the pelvis, waist and torso without interrupting mobility.

The opening look establishes the equation immediately.

A black tuxedo-bodysuit sharpens the shoulders while plunging dramatically through the chest. Second-skin legs finish around Capri length, and a twisted pale section crosses the pelvis almost like fabric caught mid-adjustment.

That same tension continues through a velvet halterneck unitard, fitted jersey dresses, and a leather bodysuit paired with lilac harem trousers. Hardness and fluidity frequently occupy the same look. Narrow shoulders open into draped volumes. Tight torsos give way to broad trousers or floating skirts. Severe lines suddenly reveal a hip.

The Body Stays in the Picture

SS27 contains plenty of skin, though exposure never fully becomes the subject.

Transparent skirts, bare breasts, deep necklines, and exposed hips could easily turn the collection into another contribution to fashion’s long-running naked dressing cycle. Instead, Akyol keeps introducing something architectural around the body: a shoulder, a seam, leather tension, velvet weight, a twisted strap.

One dusty-pink sheer dress makes the idea almost playful. Cream-colored draping runs across the body and, seen from behind, creates the illusion of a thong line or a pale tan mark. The reference is sexy, slightly ridiculous, and immediately understandable.

Some of the collection’s best details come from Akyol thinking about what remains after clothes have been removed.

Tan lines become one reference. So do impressions left by straps, pressure marks, and the grid stamped onto skin after sitting against an old wooden-bead car-seat cover.

A beaded minidress transforms an ordinary object associated with taxis, summer heat, and long car journeys into something much more polished. Elsewhere, cords and twisted fabric appear around hips, necklines, and hems, almost tracing marks that could have been left on the body moments earlier.

Clothes touch before they decorate. They stretch, compress, rub, leave impressions, and remember posture.

Materials strengthen the idea. Velvet brings density to extremely close silhouettes. Organza introduces distance around the body. Leather produces resistance. Jersey follows movement. Mirror-like silver outerwear catches light so aggressively that a conventional trench suddenly looks closer to an object.

Burc Akyol Is Starting to Look Like a House

Burc Akyol SS27 is almost aggressively legible. The plunge, the shoulder, the exposed hip, the sheer skirt, the coat, and the elongated leg all register immediately. The attraction never depends on archival homework or a complicated explanation. That clarity is part of the collection’s pleasure, but it also creates a more interesting question: can clothes this immediately desirable continue to surprise?

The issue is hardly a lack of freakiness. Burc Akyol simply makes all of it look unusually easy. That ease is where the danger sits. A recognizable language can become predictable long before it becomes boring.

The contrast becomes even sharper once the collection’s enormous reference system enters the picture. Man Ray, Blade Runner, Art Deco, voyeurism, Cairo, Tokyo, Pantelleria, pharaonic imagery, family memory, love and loss all circulate behind the show. On the body, however, everything has already been filtered.

Very little of that mythology needs to remain visible for the clothes to work. A viewer hardly needs to identify a pharaonic wig, a cabaret reference to understand the severe shoulder, the fluid jersey or the exposed hip. That may be one of Akyol’s greatest strengths. He can absorb an unruly pile of cultural, personal and visual references, then reduce them into something exceptionally clear. The next challenge is making sure that clarity keeps producing surprise.

Founded in 2019, Burc Akyol has spent several seasons developing recognizable codes: long lines, strong tailoring, drape, exposed bodies, controlled sensuality and references that move between France, Turkey, the Mediterranean and a broader Eastern cultural vocabulary.

SS27 suggests those codes are beginning to function collectively.

Milk and wine give Akyol an especially useful metaphor for that stage of development. Discipline and desire no longer compete for separate sections of the runway. They increasingly occupy the same garment.

The collection could still use a slightly heavier pour. Burc Akyol has learned how to serve the milk. Keeping enough wine in the glass may be the more exciting challenge.