Fashion: Turkish Fashion through the Lens of a Spanish Student

After four months living in Ankara, having visited Istanbul, Izmir, Fethiye, Kapadokya, Pamukkale and Antalya, I can say in general terms all cities hide two opposite faces depicting two types of women.

Thus, who complete what I call the old Turkey, are women with modest clothing that seem that they do not really care about fashion. However, I would say they all try to give a personal and original touch to their outfit, although it can be difficult to combine fashion and religion. But part of younger generations have succeeded, they are able to look beautiful and modern by covering part of their bodies. (Visit this page for more info: http://en.modanisa.com/ ).​ Their clothing is now quite western but smoothly combined with chic touch silk scarf in head. This sector reminds me of the 60s fashion again, when Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe rode a scooter after covering their hair with cheerful scarfs.

The second type of fashion in Turkish women reminds me of the windows of large textile corporations and brands. They all look completely Western and chic, like the clothes I can see inside shops like Zara, Mango or even less affordable brands like Michael Kors. They are all good and faithful fashion victims, but sometimes dressing like how catalogs say can make readers loose their own fashion essence.

In my opinion, there is a huge concern about fashion in Turkey, almost all young girls denote style and dedication to their outfit. Those are essential characteristics to set a trend and what you want to transmit through clothing features. However, due to “Westernization” is happening in Turkey, new generations believe that large organizations such as Inditex are the ones fixing the “world’s fashion”. But that is not true, that affordable and multi-apparels corporations try to copy styles that have been capturing at the streets or those that young designers have been creating by their own. That is, this kind of corporation mimics personal and unique expressions not found in big shops, then they adapt what found to the tastes and widespread streams among the population, and finally sets the outfits at affordable rates.

In Spain and great part of Europe, those interested in fashion matters and intending to become individual expressionists of who they are, are trying to avoid the fashion set by those big brands and do not support the promotion of cheap copies that create fashion armies. For that reason, second hand shops or vintage shops are increasing their presence in most cities, because they offer genuine and exclusive clothing.Here you can compare two different Instagram from famous fashion bloggers. Both are fashion examples for the young girls, Viktoriya is mostly followed and cheered by all aged Turkish girls and Luanna the Spanish one is followed by millions of girls all around the world. The turkish one dresses using big corporations clothes, but the second one uses uncommon clothes and fixes a good example of personal style and uniqueness:​VIKTORIYA SENER 

​I decided to make a survey to 20 different Spanish girls and 20 Turkish girls to compare opinions, tastes and habits. The results did not surprise me, because as I mentioned before, the Turkish women rely on large corporations as precursors of trends, and are the only easy means of accessibility to buy clothes. However, Spanish women prefer to make them his own tendency, as they frequent alternative shops like vintage or second hand. These do not trust large corporations as marker of trends, but serve “wildcard” if you do not find anything useful in alternative shops.