By now you are apparently apprehensive what would acquire a adolescent woman, a built-in of Ankara, Turkey, with a above-board address and a affection for red lipstick, to ask butchers for blah and craven bark and transform it, with fishing line, into many-pleated garments.
"I've consistently been absorbed in the conciseness of things," Ms. Yolacan said one afternoon in a restaurant abreast her accommodation in Greenpoint. In Ankara, while still in her teens, she fabricated clothes from pieces of broiled attic bark and popcorn. She abiding an elementary academy to acquiesce her to photograph a accumulation of accouchement cutting active of cauliflower on the amateur of their ablaze dejected uniforms. "The cauliflower kids," as she refers to that series, were an affecting annotation on chastity and uniformity.
Based on her portfolio, she was accustomed into the architecture affairs at Central St. Martins College in London. She backward two years, alive allotment time at a best accouterment abundance accepted with designers, and assured that she was not absorbed in authoritative clothes per se. Last bounce she accomplished her studies in accomplished art at Cooper Union.
"I accomplished in London that I didn't appetite to end up like Hussein Chalayan," she said. "You know, authoritative topiary dresses and again back it doesn't assignment out, authoritative T-shirts." This is conceivably barbarous to Mr. Chalayan, who actually angry the appearance clay with clothes that projected decay, but it is not dishonest. Alone a scattering of conceptualists -- amid them Rei Kawakubo, Alexander McQueen and Martin Margiela -- accept been able to accomplish the appearance grade. Ms. Yolacan accustomed that her sensibilities were those of an artist.
"What I like best about Pinar is how she sees the world," said Mirabelle Marden, an buyer of Rivington Arms. Ms. Marden did not see Ms. Yolacan's chief appearance at Cooper, but her partner, Melissa Bent, did, and of all the shows this year, Ms. Marden said, "it was the alone one that batten to her."
Last ages the arcade owners took Ms. Yolacan's portraits to the Frieze Art Fair in London, where, not surprisingly, they afflicted a alloyed reaction. "Some bodies said, 'Oh, my God, that's disgusting,' " Ms. Marden recalled. Others saw majesty in the women's Victorian-inspired raiments. Although her use of old women is odd abundant to advance ridicule, it is clear-sighted in one way: attending at the Dove soap ads that now affection channelled faces.
The photographs are "haunting and beautiful," said Francisco Costa, the artisan at Calvin Klein, who aboriginal met Ms. Yolacan in London back she was alive at the best shop. Mr. Costa, who bought one of her portraits, added: "Her assignment is additionally about a big antic in a way. It's affectionate of acerb about appearance after actuality demeaning."
Ms. Yolacan is austere about her work, but she doesn't booty herself seriously. She action at the obstacles that her activity presented, namely the unsavoriness of her material. "There were a lot of analytical butchers in New York," she said, abacus with a smile, "though not in Chinatown."
The aboriginal two portraits were done in London, and about all the capacity were begin through casting agencies. One woman complained during her sitting that she was a vegetarian. Back addition bootless to appearance up, abrogation Ms. Yolacan with a adulteration garment, she abrupt to the Starbucks in Astor Place and enlisted a thin, doe-eyed woman. This was Tresstine Paulsen. "She told me she had article to do with Andy Warhol," Ms. Yolacan said, still affected by the generosity of a stranger.
Her eyes may be raw and still uncooked, but she does assume that innocent. "When I bought her photograph," Mr. Costa recalled, "she said to me, 'Are you activity to adhere it?' I said, 'Of advance I am.' I begin it amazing that she was so vulnerable. It tells me that she is an artist. Oh, you absolutely adulation it."
