Working with Merve Kılıç on the Safiya print
The Safiya Printed Maxi Dress started in July 2025 with a brief: a botanical print that read as Ottoman-archival but felt modern on a woman in London getting off the Tube. Merve Kılıç, our illustrator in Istanbul, sent the first round in August.
It was wrong. Not bad — wrong. The motifs were correct but the rhythm was too even; it looked like a wallpaper print. Merve agreed. She did a second round with longer gaps between the clusters. Closer, but we had mistakes in the grade — the motifs got too large on the XXL and too small on the XS.
What saved us was a Friday where Aisha flew to Istanbul and spent two days in Merve's studio tracing the flowers off original Iznik tiles at the Topkapı museum. We came back with a palette of 14 botanicals, half the number we'd had before. Fewer motifs, more intention.
The print you see now took twelve rounds. The screen took another three to get the ink weight right against the ecru cotton — too heavy and it bleeds, too light and it looks ghostly. Kerim at our print house in Bursa is the one who figured it out, after making his apprentice do fifteen test runs on offcuts.
Merve's second collection with us is in development for autumn 2026 — a botanical/geometric hybrid based on early Selçuk patterns. Twelve rounds so far. We'll get there.
