Designing Feminism or Fascism?

Harley Wong on fashion designer Dilara Findikoglu’s ‘Cage of Innocence’ presentation in light of Edith Wharton’s fiction.

By Harley WongDecember 29, 2025

• Cultural Studies

• Gender & Sexuality

AT LONDON FASHION WEEK in September, a piercing scream, the rumble of stomping feet and rattling chains, and the sound of a gate creaking open ripped through the air at Ironmongers’ Hall. Built in the early 1920s for a workers’ guild and now a popular wedding venue, the Tudor-style site boasts plasterwork ceilings, grand chandeliers, oak paneling, and portraits rendered in oil and set in ornate gold frames. On this particular evening, black cling film covered the floors, and all the lights were dimmed for Turkish-born designer Dilara Findikoglu’s spring/summer 2026 presentation, Cage of Innocence.

Findikoglu started her namesake label in 2016, but she garnered the fashion world’s attention the year prior when she staged a guerrilla show, #encoreCSM, with her fellow Central Saint Martins students after being rejected from participating in the school’s annual graduate show. This defiant energy carries into her provocative designs, which fuse delicate corsets with bold latex gloves. For her spring/summer 2018 collection, presented at a church, she sent one model down the runway with a black pentagram painted on her face, prompting far-right radio host Alex Jones to compare Findikoglu’s show to a “Satanic orgy.” That same year, she was a semifinalist for the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers. Findikoglu’s star has only continued to rise, earning her a devoted cult following in an industry that otherwise tends to favor male designers and luxury fashion houses.

This fervor made her latest show one of the season’s most anticipated. The line to enter the invitation-only event at Ironmongers’ Hall wrapped around the block; eventually, the police were called. More than 100 guests were left without seats, and those who had a prime viewing location remained fixed to them despite over an hour-long delay.

Instead of the “Bridal Chorus,” Severin Black’s score serenaded attendees with the deep ominous hum of a double bass. Some aimed their phones in the direction of click-clacking high heels, ready to record the first look, while others covered their ears, overwhelmed by the volume of the show’s soundtrack. The double bass was soon joined by a liturgical pipe organ and, later, a harmonizing choir, before eventually devolving into electric guitars and drums. Despite the Hall’s cathedral-like stained glass windows, the organ and choir created an atmosphere that was more haunting than devotional, while the guitars and drums were better suited to a rock concert than a fashion show.

“Women have been kept in cages of innocence and purity, being told they have to be clean and represent virginity,” Findikoglu told Vogue about her new collection, “but we come out of this cage today.” The show’s title was an obvious play on Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, in which marriage is depicted as a cage. Now, more than a century since the release of that novel, what can Findikoglu’s Cage of Innocence possibly teach us that Wharton has not already?

Wharton’s story, set primarily in 1870s New York, follows the newly engaged Newland Archer, whose betrothed, May Welland, perfectly navigates societal norms. By contrast, his fiancée’s older cousin, Ellen Olenska, embodies a fiery independence that marks her as a social pariah. When Ellen arrives from Europe, her high-society peers condemn her in hushed whispers for leaving her husband despite his reputation for infidelity and cruelty. Her greatest champion is the grandmother she shares with May, Catherine Mingott, who was granted certain freedoms as a young widow, allowed to openly associate with various “bohemian” corners of society. Findikoglu’s Cage of Innocence grapples with the opposed female archetypes represented by May and Ellen: the young virgin turned dutiful wife versus the promiscuous woman who abandons her marital vows.

When May is first introduced in the novel, she is described as “a young girl in white,” the picture of youthful innocence. When Findikoglu’s blushing bride finally emerges into view in Ironmongers’ Hall, her youthful innocence seems rather … disturbed. Her hair is sleek and polished at the roots, with small braids framing her face, not unlike May’s “fair braids,” but the model’s hair is otherwise disheveled and frizzy. She trembles down the aisle, tears gathered in the corners of her eyes, with a vacant look that dispels any assumption that these are tears of joy. Her unsteady legs, streaked with mud from her ankles to her inner thighs, seem to shake not from anticipation but from fear. It is as if she is in a trance, betrayed by her body as it ushers her toward an unwanted future. Rather than a sign of passion, her reddened cheeks seem flushed from violent exertion, like an attempted escape.

Even her attire shows signs of strife. Is the halterneck simply asymmetrical, or was its left side ripped off in a struggle? The neckline recalls the description, in Wharton’s novel, of the dress Ellen wears to the opera, where she is introduced to the reader and reintroduced to New York high society after decades away. Like the cut of Findikoglu’s design, Ellen’s gown reveals “a little more shoulder and bosom than New York was accustomed to seeing.” May’s dress, by contrast, adheres to prevailing codes of taste in displaying the “young slope of her breast to the line where it met a modest tulle tucker.” In the show, Findikoglu tears apart May’s dress to fabricate a Frankensteinian creation with misaligned lace trims and mismatched pleats and ruching, with even the hemline refusing to connect.

Complicating Findikoglu’s interpretation of the teary-eyed runaway bride who muddies and rips her gown is Wharton’s own use of the trope. When May rewears her bridal satin, accidentally catching it in the step of her carriage only to tear and stain the skirt with mud, it is in an attempt to redirect Newland’s affections from Ellen back to herself. Unbeknownst to Newland, May had told Ellen the previous day that she was pregnant, despite not being certain, which prompts Ellen to announce her return to Europe. When May’s pregnancy is confirmed two weeks later, her eyes are “wet with victory” when she shares the news with Newland, vanquishing his dream of following Ellen abroad. May wields the limited power she possesses to chain Newland (and herself) to their wedding vows—and, by extension, to the life of conformity that their parents and those before them have led. How could May dream of a life different from the one prescribed for her when she is naive about the world outside her gilded cage?

The show notes for Cage of Innocence describe the collection—which carries over the designer’s familiar motifs of deconstructed corsets in lace, leather, and latex—as “a dream brought to life for the women never even allowed to.” Findikoglu represents this prison of virtue through an ornate metal mask composed of three rows of Turkish jewelry sourced from an Istanbul bazaar. Spanning the model’s face from ear to ear, the mask’s top row, which starts just below her eyebrows, features a large centerpiece extending over her forehead and tapering to the middle of her hairline. The second row covers her nose and cheeks, and the third dangles down past her chin. Her facial features are thus completely obscured except for her eyebrows. Fittingly, the look is called “Mask of pleasing” (Look 4), a multifaceted reference—to the performance women undertake to fulfill male expectations, and to a historical metal torture device used almost exclusively against women. Findikoglu’s creation is reminiscent of a scold’s bridle, a medieval headpiece at times resembling a smiling mask or an iron cage that was used to silence outspoken women—an allusion further invoked in the look entitled “The girl in a room” (Look 19) in which the model wears on her head a leather harness that secures a large horsebit buckle in her mouth like a bar gag.

In Wharton’s novel, May conceals her marital grievances under a “Spartan smile.” It’s a charade that Ellen could not bring herself to entertain, especially when maintaining social codes would have required her to return to her husband. “But my freedom—is that nothing?” she asks Newland. “The real loneliness is living among all these kind people who only ask one to pretend!” Ultimately, both May and Ellen are trapped by the expectation that they undertake the role of dutiful wife, their social reputation diverging due to the degree of their willingness to conform.

Thus, the models in Cage of Innocence, their bodies smeared in dirt and their clothes torn to tatters, come to represent Ellen’s spirit of resistance. The women in the looks entitled “Rapture” (Look 2) and “Recognize me” (Look 11), for instance, have large branches with dried leaves tangled in their hair, as if they have just fled captivity in a forest or cemetery. They evoke the moment in Wharton’s novel when Ellen refuses to return to her husband, leading Catherine to declare, with “the cold-blooded complacency of the aged throwing earth into the grave of young hopes,” that Ellen’s life is over. In Findikoglu’s show, Ellen and her ilk have clawed their way out of the grave.

“Under the bridge” (Look 14) goes to even more dramatic extremes: pieces of hay cling to the model’s legs and dirt-streaked chest, and the seams of her stay are frayed and unfinished. Indeed, her skirt is practically missing, replaced with a thick silver belt and a scrap of sheer white fabric that accentuates rather than covers her undergarments. Still, she does not pause to brush the hay off herself or adjust the straps of her stay, which have fallen off her shoulders. Slowly and seductively, she saunters down the runway with an open purse overflowing with dark red cherries, even taking one out to press to her lips during the course of the show, determined to taste the sweetness of newfound freedom. Similarly, Wharton’s Ellen, faced with destitution, holds steadfast, and eventually her grandmother has a change of heart. Against the wishes of the family, she decides to financially support Ellen so she won’t become penniless after defying her marriage. “You sweet bird, you!” she exclaims. “Shut you up in that cage again? Never!” Ultimately, it is another woman who frees Ellen.

Elsewhere, in Findikoglu’s “Stable Ceo” (Look 25), the cage’s thin chains sprout from her model’s fingernails. The facial covering from “Mask of pleasing” has deteriorated to shield just her eyes now, like a blindfold. Silver links with medallions on the ends dangle from metal loops that seem to pierce the skin above each eyebrow. (When a reporter from Dazed asked the model backstage if she could see, she replied, with a wide smile, “No.”) The cage’s function of limiting vision has become embedded and integrated into the body, capturing the way that ideals of purity and the proper conduct for women and girls have calcified into the very being of Wharton’s May. Even if the cage is physically absent, an illusion summoned by habit, its confining traditions can still be inherited, internalized, and experienced psychically.

In much of Wharton’s novel, Newland considers it his husbandly duty to “take the bandage from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth on the world. But how many generations of the women who had gone to her making had descended bandaged to the family vault?” In time, he comes to believe that there is no use in trying to emancipate a wife who lacks the faintest idea that she is imprisoned. Over the course of May’s lifetime, the world of her adolescence crumbled and rebuilt itself under a more open-minded social contract, yet she enters the Archer vault upon her death with her eyes covered, happily believing that the same prejudices that shaped her life are still being upheld.

Although Findikoglu’s models start with their vision blurred by tears and later obstructed by metal charms, this is no longer the case in “Innocent Armour” (Look 27), one of the final looks in the collection. Like the inverse of the facial jewelry in “Stable Ceo,” the model’s face is here entirely concealed by chains, with the exception of her eyes. According to Wharton, Ellen’s eyes are uncovered because she is willing to face difficult realities, to look directly at the Gorgon Medusa. “[S]he dries up one’s tears,” Ellen tells Newland in one of their last private moments. “It’s a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re never again in the blessed darkness.” With dry eyes, Findikoglu’s model parades the detritus of the smashed cage. Chains appear as tinsel hair accessories for various models, and in “Ancient Silver Sea” (Look 26), they embellish a corset’s lace trim and wrap around the model’s calves like greaves from a suit of armor.

The final look, “Reconnection” (Look 30), features a leather harness dress with visible corset boning, almost transforming the model into a horse, complete with a long tail. The blinders that ordinarily cover the sides of a horse’s eyes, limiting its field of vision, are repurposed as breastplates. Where Newland saw Ellen as a rare butterfly he sought to keep, and Catherine compared her to a caged bird, Findikoglu’s vision of emancipation turns the woman into a much more powerful animal, not a delicate one. The chains at the bottom of the dress are, importantly, broken, and hanging loose.

Cage of Innocence has been widely applauded by fashion critics, but not long after the glowing reviews went to print, rumors circulated online that the designer had failed to abide by the principles espoused by her collection, which, according to the show notes, claimed to represent “an emancipation for all.” Allegations of Findikoglu’s workplace misconduct, including verbal abuse of interns, became a revealing point of discussion on social media, and has since culminated into an investigative report by Fashionista. One former employee recalled an instance in which Findikoglu allegedly said that a group of Black models were “too ghetto” to cast for her runway. And a Tumblr post, resurfaced on an abandoned account last active in 2014 and rumored to belong to Findikoglu, featured a scanned newspaper clipping announcing Hitler’s death, paired with the caption “please come back.”

These recent revelations, or open industry secrets made public, do, however, help to explain the aesthetically transgressive brand’s repeated decision to align with those who hoard wealth, resources, and power. This past summer, while another designer (whose provocative collections have also invited accusations of Satanism) engaged in sex work to raise funds for refugees and at-risk transgender youth, Findikoglu was dressing Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner for the wedding of Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos.

Whereas Wharton satirized high-society attitudes, exposing their cruelties and prejudices (and, in turn, earning her own accusations of antisemitism), Findikoglu recycles counterculture garb to adorn the billionaire class, which then funds the politicians, who then further strip away rights from the most vulnerable among us. It has been less than a year into Donald Trump’s second presidential term, the inaugural fund of which received a two-million-dollar donation from Amazon, and we are already seeing a vast expansion of immigrant detention centers and an unprecedented assault on transgender rights. While Findikoglu speaks of shattering metaphorical cages, her designs—the chains and harnesses, the visible corsets, the suggestive cherries—rub shoulders with the very people who facilitate the construction of literal ones.