Ülkühan Akgül
Ülkühan Akgül is a multidisciplinary designer and creative director based in Amsterdam, with roots in the Turkish diaspora. Their work sits at the intersection of fashion, digital technology, and critical design. Akgül was selected as one of the finalists for Lichting 2023, the prestigious emerging designers program showcased during Amsterdam Fashion Week. Collaborating with fellow designer Batuhan Demir, Akgül participated in the State of Fashion 2024 exhibition in Arnhem. Akgül crafted the visual campaign for FASHIONCLASH Festival 2025 in Maastricht. The campaign featured AI-generated portraits and still lifes that represented archetypes such as “The Poet,” “The Performer,” and “The Designer.”
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For me, the idea of ‘Etnisch Profiteren’ is not an abstraction, but a reality I witnessed in my environment in the past and continue to see in society every day.”
– Ülkühan Akgül
On September 4, 2025, designer Ülkühan Akgül will present his debut collection, Etnisch Profiteren, at Amsterdam Fashion Week.
Etnisch Profiteren
A collection not only embracing the cultural aesthetics, business landscape of capitalism, diversity policies, and corporate box-ticking, but also critically examining them. Akgül invites the audience to look beyond the glamour, into the structures that lie beneath.
In a time when fashion and society eagerly borrow symbols from worlds unfamiliar to them, Etnisch Profiteren lifts the veil on appropriation and profit. Not through dry critique, but with a language of allure: bold forms, heavy materials, and abrasive textures that both attract and repel.
Teaser silhouettes
Akgül’s silhouettes are robust and charged; flowing lines collide with sharp volumes, craftsmanship connects to heritage and labor, and colors carry the tension of memory and hierarchy. Each garment balances on the edge between admiration and exploitation, between tradition and transformation.
The show takes place in the Hollandsche Manege, a venue that embodies the tension between workhorses and showhorses*. Here, models are not anonymous carriers but living archives, making tangible the tension between visibility and instrumentalization.
One of the most striking looks is constructed from thousands of black and white LEGO bricks. Not a colorful game, but a heavy armor: playful yet uncomfortable, a tribute to labor and perseverance. It reflects the process of building and rebuilding: brick by brick, just as guest workers once literally built their futures, stone by stone. With Etnisch Profiteren, Ülkühan Akgül makes his debut not as a promise, but as a confrontation. His work is hard, playful, uncomfortable, and honest at the same time. It is fashion that asks questions you cannot look away from.
More information about of this show here.
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Our next event : TRESOR – Berlin – 18.09.2025 – get pre-sale tix
