Burc Akyol Fall/Winter 2026 at Paris Fashion Week

Burc Akyol Fall/Winter 2026 / FW26 at Paris Fashion Week presents COLL 05 FALL, “LA COLLECTIONNEUSE”

Have you ever heard of the Marylin Monroe and the Manhattan crowd wave story? A surprisingly quiet walk in the streets of the city with husband Arthur Miller in the early days of their marriage. Miller teases Monroe: “See, you’re not that big a star. Nobody recognizes you”. To which Monroe replies: “You want me to be Marylin?” and proceeds to glide away with her iconic one-foot-about-to-break walk. Follows a crowd wave so big it leaves Miller stupefied and speechless, and unable to reach his wife before the police intervenes.

Clichés and codes make history. Is this a good thing, a bad thing, I can’t tell but I know they leave an almost hereditary mark on us. We are in the 8th year of my label. For the past seven years I led this ascetic life completely dedicated to my craft. Making is my every day. I work from home and long hours in a 2-men company cut me off from any outside life for a long time. Building is the moto, the mantra. The language gets clearer, but this 8 year made me think I was kind of macerating with myself in this pot of codes and obsessions. It is still the beginning of our voice for so many outside my label but for me, a sense of 8, a loopy and infinite maze seems to have taken over my senses. I live with my label, myself, my thoughts, my codes within these walls and I hammer away. Where a certain sense of self disappeared, I gathered confidence but also longing for the city I live in. This longing did not make me shed skin but made me take the muscles out. I started to get the odd drink or dinner with friends and acquaintances again, and the occasional drunken dance with Paris until dawn just reminded me how much I had missed her eroticism.

My Parisienne. This Parisienne of my childhood, the nostalgic and the one I dreamed of meeting when I moved here as an adolescent. But also, the one I keep building, in me, in my flesh and my work. Paris’ eroticism is not simply a set of tricks applied to a seduction scheme. It is a complex system sinuously combining classicism, a naturalist theatricality, urban mythology, excess, discipline and transgression (the Je ne sais quoi). In other words, soil and manure for clichés rooted deep and growing tall like Eiffel-towers. I adore this Parisienne in 1967 Rohmer, in On ne meurt que deux fois, in le petit déjeuner de Mademoiselle Agnès, in 1975, in my aunts plumetis stockings under 501’s, in the 8th Arrondissement side of la Place de Clichy where I live and work, in Agnès Varda’s Caryatids and mine (dresses numbered I to I don’t know when I will stop iterations of this move which holds the dearest place in my monomaniac mind).

La Collectionneuse is that monomaniac alter-ego of my Parisienne. Collector of clothes, codes, lovers and moments of life in Burc Akyol. Collector of memorabilia and reminders of self too. She’s a little me, Never over the images 1 grew up with. Never over the sense of freedom these clothes bring even when they swirl around you and impose a hand in the pocket on the edge of breaking apart with one movement should you let go, as frail and elusive as desire and lone walks home at dawn after parading in something you own that’s a little more special and evocative. Paris c’est la nuit, mais ne se collectionne jamais mieux qu’à l’aube.

Words by Burc Akyol