The Road to Silence
Sometimes we drew closer, sometimes we drifted apart, and then, at another time, in another collection, we met again. And with each meeting, it was not only our work that changed — we changed a little, too.
Perhaps what we call a return to the essence is exactly this. Not returning to where we started as the same person, but arriving at ourselves once more, carrying with us what we saw along the way, what we lost, what we learned and what we left behind.
Looking at this idea of a return to the essence that Gül explores in Il Silenzio, I see a similar line in our own journey. Because throughout all those collections, we kept returning to cultural memory, to women, to Istanbul, to craft, to the traces the past leaves in the present. Each time we looked from a different place; each time, a little more changed.
Looking back now, I think that all that time we were not simply putting clothes together. More than an image, we were building a way of seeing. As Gül turned fragments of her own memory into fabric, pattern and embroidery, I tried to complete that world within the image. I would open the collar of one dress, add another layer over another, and sometimes do nothing at all and simply step back. Before the shows, we fell silent in the same rush; on shoots, we chased the same image. This road, which began in Istanbul, carried us to the rooms of the Pera Palace, to the Grand Hotel de Londres, to the mountains of Baksı.
At the time, we didn't know that all of this, placed side by side one day, would tell a long story. While we are living it, we can never see the whole of our own story. Then the years pass; an old photograph turns up and, for an instant, time disappears. You remember the texture of a fabric, the light in a room, the silence just before a show begins. And you understand: some roads have no beginning and no end. Only the stops that transform us.
One of the first stops I remember is Frida in Istanbul, in 2016. As Gül carried Frida's colours, her stubbornness and her fragility to Istanbul, I was styling the collection. Then came Agatha in Istanbul, in the rooms of the Pera Palace, and after that, from among blacks and laces, Simone in Istanbul. Looking back today, I remember them less as three separate collections than as three different women passing through the same story. Frida, Agatha, Simone… Each was a different character, but in all of them lay Gül's curiosity about women, her relationship with the past, and an invisible trace of Istanbul.
With Mini Sultans of Istanbul, we returned to another memory of the city. Little sultans wandering among the shadows of the past in the old rooms of the Grand Hotel de Londres… In Gül's world, East and West were never separated by sharp lines; one seeped into the other, and the past left small traces on the present. This is what I see most in Lug Von Siga today: Istanbul's memory living on not behind glass, but on a contemporary woman.
Then the names changed, the women multiplied, and the work we did together opened onto other geographies. In 2019, with New Gypsies, we built a freer world among colours, jewellery and patterns. Then Timescape took us to Baksı. In the middle of the mountains, under the open sky, watching a white dress move in the wind, I remembered once again that sometimes the right styling decision is to add nothing at all.
Then came Roots. Its name already carried its story: roots. Old Uzbek bedspreads and suzanis that had waited for years in the Grand Bazaar; with their embroidery, they were like small fragments of memory that had reached the present from other hands, from another time. When they met contemporary silhouettes, it was less the new than the forgotten that became visible again. The traces Gül had been seeking in Anatolia for years now reached further east, to Central Asia. For me, of all the work we did together, Roots came closest to what its name said: touching our roots not to go back to the past, but to look at the present differently by remembering where we come from.
Then Mystic Traveler… The Hand of Fatima, Rumi, symbols, journeys. As time went on, I noticed that certain words kept returning in Gül's world: woman, memory, journey, craft, East, West, past and present. I think that is what kept me close to her world through all these years. Because I, too, have never looked at fashion only in pursuit of the "new". I have always been more curious about how the past goes on living in the present, about the memory of a garment, about where a fabric comes from.
Watching the evolution of Gül's design language so closely, I also saw something that never changed: her curiosity about cultural heritage. But this was never about repeating the past as it was. An embroidery, an old fabric, a piece of Anatolian handwork or a pattern lingering in memory became, in her hands, another language belonging to the present. This is exactly where the world of Lug Von Siga was built: without romanticising the past, without treating craft as mere ornament, carrying cultural memory into a contemporary woman's wardrobe. As the collections reached beyond Istanbul to other cities and other runways, this language matured along with Gül.
Today, when I place all these collections side by side, I see an invisible kinship between them. An embroidery, a story, a woman, sometimes just a feeling, passing from one to the next… None is a repetition of another, yet all are nourished by the same memory. That is exactly the language we built together: not keeping the past locked away, but summoning it into the present, each time in a different form.
And now that road is taking Gül back to Milan. On 23 September, Gül Ağış presented Il Silenzio, Lug Von Siga's Spring/Summer 2027 collection, during Milan Fashion Week. Milan is not a new city for her. It is the city where she completed her fashion education at Istituto Marangoni, spent nearly a decade of her professional life, and worked for four years at Costume National in Ennio Capasa's team. Then she returned to Istanbul and founded Lug Von Siga in 2010. Now, sixteen years later, she is returning to one of the cities where she began. Carrying with her Lug Von Siga, which she has grown with her own hands.
And with her, there is also a silence: Il Silenzio.
In Milan this time, everything is white. But Gül's white is not an empty white. It holds the memory of dowry chests, old lace, hand-worked fabrics and handcraft passed down from generation to generation. Silk, chiffon, taffeta, sheer layers… Some draw close to the body, some move away from it. The dresses seem less worn than remembered.
Il Silenzio thinks of silence not as an absence, but as a place where one can hear one's own voice again. That is why the collection is as much about a return to the essence as it is about silence. Leaving behind, one by one, all that has been added to us over the years, and returning to the place where we began — to ourselves. The bond Rumi and Shams forged beyond words also moves through the unseen side of the collection: love, longing, searching, surrender… And a handkerchief left in a loved one's hand at parting, in Anatolia. Sometimes the road to one's essence begins with the smallest of keepsakes.
I love this idea. That a tiny piece of fabric can carry a person's absence. That an object can keep a sentence we could not say far longer than we ever could. Looking at the images from Milan, this is where I see the collection's greatest strength. For all its handcraft, there is no desire to show off. Within the white, lace, embroidery, ruffles and sheerness layer upon one another, yet in the end what remains is a calm image. Maturity is partly this: knowing what you could show, and choosing what not to.
That is why I cannot read Gül's return to Milan simply as fashion week news. When a person returns to a city where they lived years ago, they never really return to the same place. The city may be where it was, but the person is not. I think of that well-known saying attributed to Rumi: "I was raw, I was cooked, I became whole." This is the hidden geometry of every journey. We go away, we change, and one day we come back to where we began. The same street, the same city, sometimes the same person… But now we look with different eyes.
I, too, now look back on the years Gül and I spent together from another place. I think of Frida, Agatha, Simone, Mini Sultans; of the shows, the shoots, the wind at Baksı. Back then, each was a separate moment, lived within its own rush, its own calendar. Now they all stand side by side like the words of a single sentence — as if the meaning would change were one of them missing.
That is why Il Silenzio does not feel to me like just a new collection. It feels like a familiar sign glimpsed from afar, after all the years our paths have crossed. Perhaps her return to Milan and my looking back on all these years meet in the same place: in the return to the essence. Not returning to where we began, but returning to ourselves as we have become along the whole road.
With some people, our roads come to an end. With others, they only change form. And sometimes, after all that has been said over the years, only one thing remains: silence.
But within that silence lies the whole story.