Hatice Gökçe: Remnant — The Remains of Time

Marking 25 years, Hatice Gökçe returns with her new collection, “Remnant”, to one of fashion’s most fundamental questions: what do we do with what is left behind?

HAKAN BAHAR

Walking through the quiet streets of Topağacı, I approach Hatice Gökçe’s atelier in Nişantaşı. In front of the ground-floor space stands a crow made of black metal, as if it had struck up an almost natural relationship with the everyday rhythm of the street. In Istanbul, crows have always seemed like creatures that carry something of the city’s memory. Perhaps that is why this figure at the atelier door feels to me like a small sign before I even step inside. For Hatice Gökçe’s designs often begin at exactly this point: in the traces that drift through the city, in fragments left behind, in details that slip past unnoticed. Inside, a quiet state of making moves among fabrics, threads and unfinished surfaces. As daylight filters through the window and wanders over the pieces on the rails, each seems to carry the trace of a different story. Some continue a familiar texture; others look like fragments left over from another past.

Marking 25 years, Hatice Gökçe returns with her new collection, “Remnant”, to one of fashion’s most fundamental questions: what do we do with what is left behind? Is what the industry defines as “waste” truly worthless, or is it merely a trace the system has chosen to ignore? “Remnant” is a collection made from surplus or discarded fabrics, unravelled into yarn and rewoven on a small loom. The process begins not by cutting a ready-made cloth, but by taking existing material apart and rebuilding it. Each surface is thus reshaped through different tensions and densities, while the traces of the past are deliberately kept rather than erased.

In Hatice Gökçe’s approach, sustainability is not a slogan but the method of production itself. Choosing to transform what already exists rather than create new material also defines the collection’s aesthetic language. The pieces exist not with a claim to wholeness, but through the layers of different pasts. This approach reaches the collection’s intellectual core as well. “Remnant” invites us to rethink masculinity not as a finished, monolithic identity, but through the traces left by lived experience, by what was given up, by emotions held back. Instead of a figure that draws its strength from a hard masculinity, it proposes a maturity that does not hide its cracks, yet does not fall apart. This is why the pieces in the collection work not only as garments but also as surfaces of narrative. Within the different textures, rewoven fabrics and layered surfaces, the traces of the past remain visible. These unerased traces build the starting point of the design out of “what is left behind”. “Remnant” thus goes beyond an aesthetic choice. In Hatice Gökçe’s collection, what is counted as waste is not a residue the system ignores; on the contrary, it becomes the most honest starting point of design.

I have followed Hatice Gökçe’s design practice closely for years. Since my first encounter with her collections, I have watched her pursue a different question each season. Sometimes the memory of a fabric, sometimes the fragile sides of masculinity, sometimes that fine line where tailoring can become an almost intellectual discipline… In my fashion shoots I have brought her pieces before the camera and seen up close the relationship that leather, silk or a heavy wool forms with the body. But what truly defines Hatice Gökçe’s designs may be the ideas moving beneath these surfaces. For her, a garment has never been merely a form, but a structure that takes shape slowly within time, experience and thought.

A story is often rebuilt from within what has already been lived. For the past is never a fully closed place; it is a living space within memory, forever changing shape. The small traces that surface in the texture of a fabric, in the silence of a room, or in a silhouette met again years later — remnants, perhaps, fragments left behind — allow the story to begin again. In that moment, the past is not simply remembered; it is reinterpreted, rewritten. These remains, filtering through time, look like small fragments kept by memory, yet they are in fact the starting point of a new narrative. For memory does not merely preserve what happened: it takes those remnants, transforms them and turns them into the raw material of an entirely different story.

The pieces in the collection work not only as garments but also as surfaces of narrative. Rewoven fabrics and layered textures make the traces of the past visible. The starting point of the design is thus not what is new, but what has been left behind. For Hatice Gökçe, “Remnant” is not simply an aesthetic choice. The collection recalls a truth fashion often overlooks: sometimes the most powerful story lies hidden in what is left behind. As I leave the atelier in Topağacı, Istanbul is still on the threshold of spring. Stepping back into the street among the trees, the thought that stays with me is this: what is new is nothing more than the remembering of what was left behind.