In Search of Hidden Beauty: Fatoş Yalın
My Istanbul lies, in part, in the care people give to the small details of life. In the way a table is laid, in the clothes chosen before stepping out into the street, in the way a guest is welcomed… When I look at fashion, too, my eye always drifts there. I am as curious about the person who carries a dress as about the dress itself — their movements, the world they build around them. Sometimes sitting in someone's home tells you more about their sense of beauty than years of watching what they wear.
When we trace Fatoş Hanım's own way of seeing, we go back much further than magazine pages. To childhood, to the lights of houses. She was born in Ankara; her parents were from Istanbul but lived in Ankara for a time because of her father's work. She tells me that as a little girl she paid attention to the lights of houses seen from outside. Some she found beautiful; the showy chandeliers she encountered when they came to Istanbul, that excess of light spilling outside, she did not like. Even as a child, she knew what she felt close to. I say fashion; she speaks of aesthetics. What entered her life, she says, was not fashion; beautiful things were always there. Her father was a painter. As we talk, she shows me a charcoal portrait of her mother, drawn by her father, in the house. For a moment I stop talking and look at the portrait. There is something in her mother's face that recalls Maria Callas — not merely a physical resemblance, but the strong expression the face carries, an elegance that seems to belong to another time. In that moment I understand a little better the roots of Fatoş Hanım's relationship with beauty. Perhaps a child's eye is trained, before it even knows what fashion is, by the faces, pictures and objects it sees at home. Her mother was an elegant woman. She grew up in a modern home, among her parents' belongings, friends and choices. During our conversation she shows me a table from her childhood. The past she has been describing suddenly becomes tangible. The years we were just talking about rest on an object still in use. To my mind, this is how time accumulates in certain homes. Objects are not simply kept; they remain part of life, witnessing new conversations. One grows up, the city changes, but one keeps sitting around the same table. "I like being out of fashion," she says. I love the ease of that sentence — the contentment of someone who has come from inside fashion and can stand outside it. She mentions old photographs taken at Club Med in the 1970s. Looking at them, she sees herself, one year when everyone was in flares, in narrow, short trousers. She wore what she loved then, too. Today, looking at a piece of clothing, she still listens to her own feeling first. For her, fashion is less about the times telling you what to wear than about knowing what you love. As we move towards the Istanbul she describes, the city grows quieter. A handful of apartment blocks in Ulus, places close to one another, Ortaköy, Bebek… During her years at Galatasaray High School, Ortaköy was part of her daily life too. Measured against today's distances, there is a calm in it that I can't quite place in the same city. As if more life fitted into a single day. The Grand Bazaar had a great influence on her. She talks about the jewellers, the beautiful fabrics, the different materials. Then comes Beyoğlu. Arcades, cafeterias, shops. Places people once went to open up again in the conversation. She mentions Rejans. Bab Cafeteria, near the Atlas Arcade. Then the names of shops: Ali Alta Moda, and Elegan in Şişli. Istanbul's small fashion geography, which now belongs to another time, appears before us name by name. I linger on what she says about Elegan. She remembers the knitwear, but not only that. She remembers, too, the scent of Dunhill cigarettes mingling with perfume inside. We cannot decide what memory will keep. Years later, what remains of a shop may be not so much a garment in the window as the scent that met you the moment you stepped through the door. Recalling a shop, she describes not only the clothes but the carpets, the coffee cups and the women who were there. The mohair knits do not stand alone in her memory. They come back together with the life that surrounded them. I sense how elegance spreads through a place, passing from people to objects. Perhaps the memory of Istanbul I love is hidden exactly here. Not in great events, but in the small details no one thought to record. The cafeteria at the entrance of an arcade, the name of a shop that no longer exists, the texture of mohair, the mingled scent of cigarettes and perfume… A city sometimes appears most vividly when you remember the door of a shop you can never go back to.
"Everyone had their own fashion back then." One woman more classic, another more modern, another more flamboyant. Each carried a style brought from the world she grew up in. In the Istanbul she remembers, the differences between people were distinct. There was no world, as there is today, that confronts you everywhere and suggests the same thing to everyone at once. In old photographs of Istanbul, I too am often struck first not by the clothes but by the way people carry themselves. The way a woman holds her handbag, the ease of a man inside his jacket, a faint care taken before stepping into the street… As Fatoş Hanım talks about her mother, these photographs come to life. She reminds me that dressing is a preparation that begins before you leave the house. "Style begins with attitude, anyway." From here the conversation turns to words. To forms of address, pronunciations, the ways people call out to one another. Sometimes you notice a city changing with your ears. A word you know is said differently; a different kind of familiarity replaces the distance you were used to. The street bears the same name, but the conversation has changed. When we return to her magazine years, the sounds of a workroom mingle with the city. Pages enlarged, reduced, cut and pasted again. Films going to print. Before computers, a magazine was first built by hand. Fatoş Hanım describes the toil of those years, but what she dwells on is the feeling of working together. Being in the same place, hearing one another's ideas, being influenced, objecting. The rush at the end of each month, voices sometimes rising. The pages came out of all this. "It was very warm, very intimate." Intimacy is the word she keeps coming back to throughout our conversation. She uses it to describe the closeness she looks for in a photograph, and the distance that has crept in between her and today's publications. When she speaks of her passion for magazines, her voice still carries that old excitement. If there was a magazine lying somewhere in a house she visited, she couldn't turn her attention to anything else before looking at it. She would carry magazines back from her travels until her arms ached. She tells me about going to buy the first issue of Marie Claire in Turkey. The memory of holding it, opening its pages, breathing in its smell, is vivid. I know that feeling too. The possibilities inside a page you have not yet opened. Lingering on a photograph, reading for the first time a name you have never heard. Sometimes, even after you close a magazine, an image from it walks around with you for days. She says she can't form the same relationship today. But she leaves room for the possibility that her own way of seeing has changed. Over the years, what one looks for changes. What she misses is being able to feel that people lived behind the pages. People who had come together, argued, believed in something. When the conversation reaches Fey, today's form of all this experience comes into view. Fatoş Hanım does not define herself as a designer. Describing what she does, she chooses her words carefully. "I know how to choose." She adds that here she cannot be modest. It is a confidence earned through years of looking, sifting, putting things side by side. She falls for a print, then searches for the accessories to accompany it. The shape of the garment gradually emerges. Not everything has to fit within a decision made in advance. Something she likes opens the way to what comes next. She wanted Fey to remain somewhat hidden. A place where those who know come, where whoever seeks it out finds a world close to their own. Talking about her shop in Athens, too, she cares less about how many people come in than about who they are. She speaks of sensing that someone who walks in belongs to that world. "I love hidden beautiful people. I love hidden beautiful places." It is one of the sentences that tie together everything she told me that morning. She loves elegance, but not effort. The insistence felt in a person, in a place, in every detail, pushes her away. The beauty she loves holds a little ease, and a little space left for discovery. When we come to vintage clothes, this sense of choosing becomes even more intuitive. Where a piece turns up doesn't matter. It could be at a market, on a handcart, even on the ground. If she loves it the moment she sees it, that feeling is enough. Once at a market, she reached for a striped T-shirt. At the other end of it, pulling, was Jean Paul Gaultier. Both had seen the same thing, wanted it at the same moment. In this small encounter, which she recounts laughing, I find a familiarity far from all of fashion's grand pronouncements: noticing a piece in the crowd and reaching out your hand. The same excitement is there when she talks about a brocade coat she found in New York. Among the hangers, before she had even seen it whole, she was drawn to it. When she pulled it out, what she loved was right in front of her. She doesn't explain why at length. The knowledge of certain choices comes before words. "If you love something, it suits you." This sentence holds an important place in her relationship with clothes. She believes that wearing a piece with love changes the way it sits on a person. When I bring an old garment into the present, that is the moment I love most too. When it passes from the hanger to the body and comes alive again. When someone gives it another life through their own movements. When she speaks about newness, it becomes clear she is not easily excited. Hers is the memory of an eye that has seen a great deal. She recalls the excitement she felt at Hussein Chalayan's shows, the moments she remembers crying. Some images are not simply admired and passed by; they change your idea of what is possible. Today, in her own work, she insists on quality. She speaks of how it is becoming ever harder, and of its cost. Choosing a beautiful fabric, making a piece of the quality she wants, comes at a concrete price. The aesthetics we talked about all morning turn here into the decisions of everyday work. What she will accept, where she will not give in. After a while the conversation moves from words to images. We photograph Fatoş Hanım at home in three different looks; the photographs are taken by her sister, Bige Yalın. I watch the question of "choosing" we have been discussing for hours unfold, this time, before my eyes. Her stance changes in front of the wardrobe. Looking at the hangers, a different seriousness comes over her face. She takes a piece in her hand, looks at it, brings something else beside it; sometimes she puts it down at once, sometimes she considers it a few seconds longer. Watching her, I realise this is not simply deciding what to wear. I am witnessing the quiet work of an eye that has looked, chosen and sifted for years. With every click of Bige's shutter, three different Fatoş Yalıns appear before us, yet in all three the same thing remains: attitude. I think again of the sentence she said that morning: "Style begins with attitude, anyway." The clothes change, the proportions change, sometimes a colour or a texture carries the whole image somewhere else, but the way a person inhabits their clothes does not change. Perhaps that is exactly where style begins. Not in what is in your wardrobe, but in knowing what you choose and why. As the photographs are taken, the house enters the frame too. The table I saw that morning, the objects, the walls, the charcoal portrait of her mother drawn by her father… Suddenly I see Fatoş Hanım not just in three different looks but within the whole world she described all morning. Clothing, person and place cannot be separated. Perhaps that is why I think of these three frames as something beyond a fashion shoot — a continuation of the conversation we had that morning. And perhaps the hidden beauty we pursued all morning lies partly here too. In the seriousness shown in choosing a garment, in the tiny decision made while touching a fabric, in the glance exchanged between two sisters that needs no words. Beauty does not always come to you ready-made. You have to see it in the crowd, recognise it and quietly choose it. Towards the end of our conversation, Istanbul opens up before us once more. Bebek Kahve, Ortaköy Square, Kilyos… Places where Fatoş Hanım did shoots. Bebek Kahve was her open-air studio. They would spread out the clothes and work. There was hardly anyone around. Before mobile phones, anyone at the office who needed to reach her would call there. In the middle of a shoot, she would be told there was a call for her. With this small detail, all those years she has been describing suddenly come close to me. When she thinks about what someone starting out in the profession today has lost, these open-air studios are the first thing that comes to mind. The ease of being able to work within the city, to make it part of the story. My mind drifts back to Samatya. My first shoot. Then the door of an office, and the sentence I heard behind it. Fatoş Hanım's Istanbul and mine, passing through different years, arrive at the same table. Listening to her in Tarabya, at the white-linen table, I think how these encounters live on within my own way of looking at fashion. In a garment I love, I do not look only for the trace of a designer. I am also curious about the eye that chose it, the person who wore it, the places it belonged to and left behind. As Fatoş Hanım talks, she shows me the table from her childhood. A little further away stands the charcoal portrait of her mother drawn by her father. I remember the pages of the magazine I opened years ago. An object, a face, a scent, an image, a sentence spoken at just the right time… After all these years, they are still part of our lives. Perhaps beauty is a little of this, too. Not so much showing itself where everyone can see it, as waiting to be found again, years later, in someone's memory.
Fatoş Hanım, I have known you for many years, but I have never asked you this: how did fashion come into your life? In those early years when you decided to become a fashion editor, what kind of fashion city was Istanbul?
I started as a fashion editor in 1990. In the early years there were no international brands in Turkey; even globally, designers like John Galliano and Jean Paul Gaultier were only just becoming famous. When I had a shoot, after deciding on the theme, I would sometimes have special pieces made to order. For instance, when I was going to Cannes, I had sequinned bikinis made by Zeki Triko. My curiosity about fashion — or rather, about clothes — probably began in the years I worked summers at Club Med. In the '80s I met French women who dressed so charmingly, so differently, that I would buy many of their clothes when they were heading home… In Istanbul, the first elegant shops I remember were Ali Alta Moda and a shop called Elegan.
Your journey from fashion editor to editor-in-chief coincides with the transformation of fashion magazines in Turkey. Looking back on those years, what was the biggest difference between making a magazine then and now?
Magazine-making requires a "relationship"! A magazine has to be sincere and trustworthy. Arrangements, interviews and shoots done over text messages… Recommendations from so-called influencers based on whatever suits them that day, models retouched beyond recognition in Photoshop, and now, finally, the endless tricks of AI have begun to call this precious relationship into question. When Marie Claire first came out, there was such a thing as the Marie Claire woman. "Beautiful, Real and Free" — that was the magazine's first advertising slogan. As long as these values still hold, I think all the other changes are extremely positive.
When you think of the Marie Claire years, which I was part of too, is there something the Istanbul fashion world had then that you feel it has lost today?
Yes, things have been lost: style and modesty. There is no modest silhouette left; everything is exaggerated, showy, trying too hard! And when it tries that hard, of course it is open to every criticism. In other words, lately fashion seems to make people uneasy when it should make them feel good. Well, it isn't easy, trying that hard.
As a fashion editor, you spent years showing people what is beautiful. But who trained your eye — which cities, which books, which people? Is taste something that can be learned?
My greatest luck was growing up with two people of great taste: my mother and my father. The circles they moved in, their friends, also influenced me a great deal as I grew up. My father was an artist — not professionally, but he painted beautifully and wrote. Our home was full of books on all the great painters and all kinds of art publications. My mother was a lovely, modern woman with a style all her own. They were friends with all my friends too; I grew up close to them, and naturally my style and my tastes developed that way. Taste cannot be learned; it can only be absorbed, or inherited.
How did Istanbul shape your aesthetic world? Looking at Fey today, what traces of Istanbul can we see?
Istanbul is a free-spirited, moody, mysterious city where many cultures live side by side. Answering this question, I've actually realised for the first time how much it resembles Fey's philosophy. At Fey there are none of the classic rules brands follow. Of course, each season we decide what will be produced, but one of the questions I least know how to answer is: "What are this season's colours?" or "What's the trend?" Fey's collections take shape each season according to the mood of the days in which they are made. Because a Fey shirt or dress is never in fashion, it never goes out of fashion either. It never goes on sale, and its Instagram account is private. I don't like to define Fey as a shop. It is a place — a place where those who like it, and want to be there, come.
When I look at old photographs of Istanbul, I am sometimes struck less by the clothes than by the way people carried themselves. Do you think what has changed in Istanbul is the way people dress, or their attitude?
I think a serious psycho-sociological study needs to be done on Istanbul. This was an elegant city; even in the hardest times, people had styles of their own making that reflected their culture — pleasing, unshowy, in harmony with the texture of the city as it was then. A strange street fashion that started with leggings has gone as far as shorts that leave half the backside exposed, and even swimsuits! What kind of attitude can people walking around in these clothes have, do you think? What storms must be raging inside them for them to walk through the middle of the city like that? As I said, I think it's a subject for study!
Is there anything in today's fashion that still feels truly "new" to you?
Timelessness feels good, because whatever it is, when you put something new on top, it is impossible to give up entirely on what came before. Everything follows on from everything else and seeps into our minds and our souls. That is why small, unusual, complementary things are enough for me.
Is there anything in today's Istanbul you would like to pursue?
I have an idea of giving Istanbul a beautiful flea market. I don't know how it would happen, but such an event must be organised and set up in a large venue, with fine, quality selections.