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Today Ekmekçi works as a law professor at Istanbul University and runs an advertising agency, Dream Design Factory, with her business partner, Arhan Kayar. We are sitting in her high-ceilinged living room, decorated with mid-century Modern furniture and Ottoman-era art – on the coffee table, there’s fresh fruit and photos from our Paris party days – and I ask her why her generation of expats is becoming a generation of repats. A growing middle class among Istanbul’s population of 12 million – 75 percent of whom are under the age of 25 – and a surging market economy are certainly factors, she explains. But they’re not the whole story. Here was a city, the style makers thought, that could teach other world capitals a thing or two about modern. As Ekmekçi says this, Ece Ege – a fashion designer who went on to found the Paris-based label Dice Kayek with her sister, Ayşe – walks in. She has just come from the launch party for the Harvey Nichols store at the Kanyon, the big new Guggenheimesque shopping centre in the Levent district. Ege, who says she works in Paris but lives in Istanbul “for inspiration,” is surprised by my question. “Why do we come back?” she says, with a whiff of impatience. “Come here.” Pulling us out onto the terrace, she points to the lump-in-the-throat beauty of Istanbul’s nocturnal skyline, with its illuminated floating domes, elegant minarets and music from the superclubs that line the Bosphorus. “That’s why. You can’t see that anywhere else. You can’t feel this atmosphere anywhere else.” Flaubert’s prediction doesn’t seem so far-fetched as I walk down İstiklal, the main pedestrian street in Beyoğlu, the next day. Home in the 19th century to middle-class Jews and Christians, the neighbourhood had since fallen into ruin, a Kurdish and Gypsy slum. “Ten years ago, no one would go to Beyoğlu,” Ekmekçi told me. |
