From a Daughter of the Republic to a Femme Fatale: The Life and Times of Turkey's First Professional Fashion Model, Lale Belkıs

I woke up with a voice. It was not scary. On the contrary, how shall I explain, it was a heart-warming, soothing, echoing, soft voice. It was saying "Belkıs . . . Belkıs . . ." The voice was rising with echoes. When I opened my eyes, I saw a man's arm reaching my bed from the ceiling. A hairy, long, strong arm rested its fist on my bed. As if it was talking to me. That strong voice was saying "Belkıs, a very beautiful life awaits you . . . One day you will do very important things, you will be appreciated . . ." It was repeating these words.

—Lale Belkıs, İpek Çoraplar (2006, 23, translation is mine)

This dream was experienced by Belkıs Durmaz, a Turkish girl growing up in Istanbul in the 1940s, who, more than half a century later, narrated it in her memoirs. The interpellation however, was by no means unique to Belkıs or her unconscious. It was a reflection of gender politics in early Republican Turkey under the successive Republican People's Party gov­ernments, especially in the promises made by the state to women and the bargains female citizens entered into with the republic under the politics of state feminism.

In this essay, I will follow the story of Belkıs Durmaz, who later became the fashion model, actor, singer, songwriter, poet, painter, and designer Lale Belkıs. Moving from her experiences as a woman and her career as Turkey's first professional fashion model, I will discuss the role of fashion in Turkey's modernization and nation-building program. My focus will be on the unique history of fashion modeling in Turkey from its inception as a state-sponsored performance form to its integration into the capitalist market economy, and the emergence of diplomatic fashion shows where modernization, postcoloniality, nationalism, and gender politics coalesce to create a performance of Turkish national identity. Exploring the entan­gled dynamics of design, production, promotion, and consumption, I will discuss how the gendered dynamics of modernization and national­ism gave rise to a unique style. As I examine the perceived relationship between national identity and the female body, I will also analyze the mul­tiple significations of bodies across competing political paradigms.

Early Republican Sartorial Politics and the Girls' Institutes

The first two decades of the Republic of Turkey following its inception in 1923 under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk were character­ized by a series of legal, political, and cultural reforms aiming to construct the country as a modern, secular (albeit implicitly Sunni Muslim) nation-state. Women's role in Turkey's modernization and nation-state construc­tion program reflected the patterns of women's inclusion in nationalist projects as identified by Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis (1994): they were expected to continue the biological, social, and cultural reproduction of the collectivity; participate in national, economic, political, and military struggles; reproduce boundaries of the nation; and signify ethnic/national differences. In the context of a transition from a multiethnic Islamic Empire to a secular nation-state based on the idea of one culture, ethnic­ity, language, and religion, women were conceptualized not only as "the builders of a 'new life,' a modern way of living both in the private and the public spheres" (Göle 1997, 51) but also as the symbols of this new life. In order to facilitate women's participation in the modernization and nation-state-building efforts, the government appropriated some demands of the Ottoman and Turkish feminist movement and created a "state feminism" by granting women certain civil and political rights as well as educational and professional opportunities.

A particularly important site for the transformation of women's bodies and subjectivities in the service of the Kemalist regime was the girls' insti­tutes. Established in the 1927-28 academic year by restructuring the girls' schools of sartorial arts and crafts built in the late Ottoman Era (Arat 1998, 162), these schools combined the basic postelementary school curricu­lum with...