Samet came across the title of his graduate collection by chance, while sifting through old vinyl records during his research. Wir kommen weit her, “we come from far away,” is printed like that on the cover of a record by Tahsin İncirci, Çok Uzaklardan Geliyoruz. The moment he found it, the phrase connected instantly with the story and idea he was already building the collection around.
That story belongs to his grandfather, who came to Germany as a Turkish guest worker. For his BA collection at Hochschule Hannover, developed under mentor Prof. Johannes Assig, Samet has spent his final year translating that history, and his own experience of growing up between two cultures, into seven realized looks.
“It was not easy for my grandfather to come to Germany at that time,” Samet says. “He had to leave his familiar surroundings and build a new life in a completely different country.” At the same time, that decision laid the groundwork for the family’s future in Germany. Thinking through what his grandfather’s generation went through, Samet says, is what made the subject “very emotional and meaningful” to work with.
The title captures both sides of that experience. “For me, ‘coming from far away’ also means more than a physical journey,” he explains. “It represents everything that comes with migration: leaving something behind, starting again, carrying your history with you, and building a new future.”
To bring that idea into the clothes themselves, Samet researched historical Turkish garments and traditional craft techniques, looking at how people dressed in Turkey in the past. But he was careful not to let the collection become a straightforward act of reproduction. He paired that research with something more personal: memories of his own grandparents and family. “I wanted to combine these personal memories with historical research, so the collection would not simply be a reproduction of traditional Turkish clothing, but something that came from my own perspective and experience.”
That same instinct shapes how he treats craft more broadly. Rather than copying traditional techniques, he’s interested in rethinking them, finding, as he puts it, a balance between respecting where they come from and giving them a new identity and context. In practice, that means historical references sit alongside partly deconstructed silhouettes and experimental construction methods, with hidden structures deliberately pulled into view.
“I wanted to give these hidden elements a new life,” he says. “Things that are normally inside or not visible became visible and were given the opportunity to ‘bloom’ again, almost like a flower.” That framing isn’t incidental: flowers run through the entire collection, and they come from a very specific place, his parents’ work at a flower nursery, which has been part of his everyday life for as long as he can remember.
“For me, flowers represent strength, growth and new beginnings,” Samet says. “They bloom again and again, and I see a connection to the experiences of my family: starting over, facing new challenges and creating something new.” The forms of the flowers themselves, he adds, became a visual reference point too, feeding directly into the collection’s silhouettes and construction.
Samet doesn’t single out one look as the collection’s centerpiece; for him, each of the seven pieces carries a different part of the research, memory, and emotion behind the project, and it’s only together that they form the fuller story. That distributed structure reflects how personal the process was. Working so closely with his own family’s history came with real pressure. “That was one of the biggest challenges, finding my own way of telling a story that is also deeply connected to the people who came before me,” he says. What he took from it was a kind of permission: “I learned that I don’t have to tell their story exactly as it happened. I can interpret it through my own perspective and create something new from it.”
It’s a lesson he plans to keep building on. “I want to continue the story,” he says of his next steps as a designer. “There are still so many stories to tell, and I feel that this collection is only the beginning.” He wants to keep exploring personal histories, family stories, and cultural heritage, and to keep giving them, as he did here, a new life.
