London. September 2025.
In the darkness of a London venue, a show unfolds more like a ritual than a fashion presentation. Dilara Findikoglu reveals her Spring/Summer 2026 collection - Cage of Innocence. Date: September 21. Location: part of London Fashion Week. Sound by @severinblack, artwork by @_biuro, and a silence in the room so heavy it feels tangible.
No one dares to call this a runway. It is a procession of shadows in black and white, slow-moving bodies wrapped in constructions that seem built for ritual rather than wear.
The cage as metaphor
The title “Cage of Innocence” reads like an oxymoron: innocence is not free, it is confined. In Findikoglu’s world it is not an aura, but a framework that compresses. What should be light and pure becomes an architecture of control.
The cage is double-edged:
It disciplines the body - shaping the silhouette, limiting the step, defining the posture.
It preserves and protects - but at the cost of freedom.
It performs innocence - but innocence becomes a stage prop, not a state of being.
This is a narrative about the social engineering of femininity. About how the demand to “be pure” becomes a mechanism of power. About how purity itself can be a prison, not a blessing.
White shadows and black imprints
The figures on the runway are both fragile and armored.
• Caged silhouettes: sheer fabrics stretched over metallic ribs, bustiers like sculpted restraints. The body turns into a museum artifact.
• Leather and lace: the harsh and the delicate fused together, a reminder that innocence always borders on fetish.
• Masks and helmets: faces concealed, femininity anonymized. Innocence forced into hiding.
• Stains and marks: white fabrics carrying traces that cannot be erased - the memory of touch, of trauma, of experience that forever taints “perfect purity.”
Findikoglu builds contrasts that refuse comfort. In white there is always a shadow, in black a seduction.
The theatre of femininity
This is not a runway but a performance. Each model moves like part of a ritual: slow, deliberate, with held breath. It is not about the walk - it is about pose as resistance.
Different archetypes coexist. A girl in frills and a woman in latex. A bride in white and a warrior in black. Light and shadow.
They do not replace one another - they emerge as two sides of the same entity. Femininity here is never monolithic. It is always split, always in dialogue with the cage it inhabits.
Sound and space
@severinblack soundscape is industrial, dense, like the echo of metal doors closing. It does not embellish - it constricts the room, amplifying the heaviness of the cage. @_biuro artwork frames the show as though it is happening inside a visual altar.
No illusion of softness. Everything is built on emptiness, light, and sound. Minimalism that magnifies the skeletal structure of the collection itself.
Why Cage of Innocence unsettles
This is not clothing meant “to wear.” It is an image meant to be stared at, perhaps feared. It is innocence revealed not as a soul’s state, but as a social construct.
Dilara shows that white can be more terrifying than black, that purity always carries the trace of violence, that femininity today is not freedom but a permanent life in a cage.
Afterword
In London, this was not another fashion show but a ritual of restraint. Dilara Findikoglu staged a story where innocence is not a gift but a cage; not an ornament but armor; not a condition but a discipline.
In her Cage of Innocence, the body is not only adorned - it is imprisoned. And in that imprisonment lies its power.
