Enough! Let us put an end to this travesty of style’s History, dressed up only to amuse the fashionable gallery. Gothic was not born in some backroom of Central Saint Martins between two Instagram selfies and a sponsored “rebellious” performance. No: it was conceived, forged, and imposed on fashion by Jean-Luc Amsler. Full stop.

And now we’re supposed to swallow the idea that Dilara Findikoglu with a name fit for a roadside inn is the high priestess of darkness? What a farce! Here is a designer who proclaims herself subversive, yet only extends her hand to the market like a carnival barker. Her so-called “punk” is nothing but a runway special effect, her “feminism” a Turkish sales tag, and her “gothic” a kind of watered-down carnival for gullible spectators.

Her grand show “Cage of Innocence”? A cage indeed: one where imagination is locked up and reduced to a Versailles-style amusement park backdrop. Marie-Antoinette had her Hamlet of the Queen, Findikoglu will have her Disneyland of lace-clad anguish. Add a little pink, a little white, just enough to reassure investors and clients and voilà, “radicality” becomes Instagrammable!

But let’s not be fooled: all of this is nothing more than spectacle for the repressed, a cheap emotional factory line for Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ilk. The true Gothic, Amsler’s Gothic, never needed icing sugar or “feministo-compatible” storytelling. It imposed its law, relentless, like black stone architecture rising against the sky.

So no, Madam Findikoglu invents nothing. She recycles, she dilutes, she disguises. She turns heritage into product, intensity into décor, revolt into commerce. In short, she serves Gothic à la supermarket: black in the costume aisle, pink in the candy aisle. And while the crowds applaud, thinking they’re witnessing a textile revolution, on the Karda-boring photo it’s nothing but grotesque!

FM