Up until about a week ago, Dilara Findikoglu wasn’t even sure she had a venue. And then she did—a warehouse in the loosest, most lawless sense of the word. Technically, it hosts Slimelight, London’s longest-running goth club night. Realistically, it looked like a place where you might get shaken down for cigarettes or conscripted into an underground fight ring. Climbing the damp, cavernous stairs, you were greeted by a welcoming committee in the form of a Metropolitan Police notice: VICE PATROL OFFICERS OPERATE IN THIS AREA. OFFENDERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Perfect.

Obviously, it was cold. Obviously, it was raining. Obviously, getting there was a journey. Obviously, we waited. And waited. And waited.

And then—it happened. One of those moments. The kind that reminds you that London fashion still has the capacity to shock you out of your seasonal fatigue. They emerged. Women, in the most mythological sense of the word. Stalking. Commanding. Wrapped in hyper-cinched corsetry and slithering second-skin chiffon, wearing breastplates of shells, pearls, and rows upon rows of gleaming silver safety pins. Some had hair that wasn’t hair—loose shaggy falls, braids trapped under whisper-thin veils of transparent fabric. The energy? Ferocious. A dangerous, self-possessed, fully-realized sexuality let off its leash.

The clothes (if you could even call them that) rewrote the laws of anatomy. Pelvic-baring V-cuts barely qualified as shorts, micro-minis melted into lace stockings, and everything slinked or clung or twisted in ways that felt illicit. The models? Oh, they were someone—Lara Stone, Hannelore Knuts, Jean Campbell—but their fame was incidental. They moved like an army, a coven, a collective hallucination. Backstage, their instructions read like a list of prophecies: MEDIEVAL ROCKSTAR. MOODY BUT ETHEREAL. DON’T GIVE A FUCK BUT HYPNOTIZE. Mission accomplished.

It was almost laughable how good they were—like something out of Galliano’s last Margiela show, but without the budget. And crucially, from the female gaze. Findikoglu called it “a divine feminine mutiny”, and that might even be underselling it.

Afterward, in the post-show chaos, she explained the title: Venus in Chaos. “It’s about finding beauty through destruction. It’s kind of about my life—and everyone’s life too.” She spoke of “finding a new skin”, and the tattoo-etched arterial-floral patterns that climbed up the final look—a sculpted leather body piece, created by Whitaker Malem, its intricate cuts and curves as if it had been flayed from a living thing. There’s a lot to unpack here—weeks’ worth of forensic analysis. The Botticelli-meets-banshee hair. The silvered, eyebrowless eyes. The lace-edged mouths. And the way it all came together like an incantation.

But what will be remembered—the thing that will matter most—is what it meant. How Findikoglu, against all odds, turned out work of near-Parisian couture quality on sheer willpower alone. “To push my own potential,” she said. And that’s exactly it—London at its most London. A city where young designers burn brighter in the dark. You just have to push yourself to find it.