Machka Brand Guidelines: The 2004 İpekyol Group Label Designed With Dice Kayek’s Ece Ege

A retailer and a Paris-shown design house.

Machka is an Istanbul womenswear label that belongs to the group behind İpekyol. The group’s own website gives its founding year as 2004 and describes it as a “pret-a-couture” brand with a feminine, post-romantic style, aimed at urban women and worn for occasions from the office to formal evenings. In a January 2011 interview with Milliyet, Yalçın Ayaydın, chairman of the Ayaydın-Miroglio group, called Machka a five-year-old brand, which fits the same start date.

The label was set up as a partnership between a retailer and a design house. In September 2010 the Hürriyet columnist Vahap Munyar wrote that Yalçın Ayaydın, chairman of the Ayaydın Group known for İpekyol, had developed the Machka brand together with Ece and Ayşe Ege of Dice Kayek. In February 2025, writing in the business daily Ekonomi, Munyar described Machka as created jointly with Dice Kayek, the label Ece Ege and Ayşe Ege had founded in Paris, and noted that Machka had by then passed twenty years.

The 2011 Milliyet interview gives the clearest account of how the arrangement worked. Ayaydın said Dice Kayek was doing Machka’s designs and that the group had signed a 15-year contract with Ece Ege, who had carried her Dice Kayek style over to the new label. He described a collection that mothers and daughters could both wear and that could move from day into evening, and said the brand then had a shop in London. In the same interview he placed it within a three-label portfolio: İpekyol, which he said the family had founded in 1986, for working women; Twist for women of roughly 15 to 30; and Machka aimed at the upper end of the market, with customers he described as A and A-plus. The group’s website still names Ece Ege as Machka’s creative director and describes her as the designer whose roots reach to France through Dice Kayek.

Silk, pleats and couture pieces.

Fashion coverage gives a picture of Machka’s collections over time. In July 2010 Vogue Türkiye reported that the label had worked with an 18-year-old Swedish model, Catrine Sjocrana, for its new-season catalogue, photographed by Emre Ünal. The magazine described a silk-heavy collection built from chiffon, satin, georgette and crepe, finished with stones, and noted asymmetric, deliberately disordered pleats, volume and flounces on almost every piece.

Nearly a decade later the language had shifted towards prints. In March 2019 Hürriyet’s fashion section described the spring–summer 2019 collection as a reworking of romantic silhouettes through geometric prints, naming raffia-embroidered gabardine skirts, gingham dresses, poplin blouses with balloon sleeves and taffeta raincoats, with lace and guipure details on blouses meant to carry from day into evening.

The label has also made one-off pieces. In April 2022 Vogue Türkiye reported a collaboration with Gate 27, an international guest-artist programme: a five-piece couture collection designed by Ece Ege and inspired by Gate 27’s founder, Melisa Tapan, with Machka also acting as the programme’s sponsor. The magazine framed the label’s work as timeless designs with a contemporary stance and a refined line, set against Gate 27’s colour and energy. The magazine quoted Tapan describing the value of working with a Turkish brand with a global outlook. The group’s website places that couture collection in the autumn–winter 2022–23 season and describes it as sculptural, with pieces made specifically for Tapan.

Machka has used well-known faces in its campaigns. The group says Arzum Onan, who won the Miss Turkey and Miss Europe titles in 1993, represented the label as brand ambassador for autumn–winter 2018–19, in a collection it describes as inspired by art movements, and that the autumn–winter 2025–26 collection drew on the style of the actor Sinem Kobal.

Design and documentation.

Turkish fashion and menswear brands tend to present themselves through the things they make and the places they sell them. Tailored suits, shirts, knitwear, leather goods and womenswear lead the product pages, and many labels describe made-to-measure or ceremonial ranges, such as tuxedos for weddings, alongside everyday clothes. Product names and fabrics are usually given plainly, with the collection season as the main organising idea.

Retail format carries much of the identity. Some names began as department stores and now run several store formats under one roof, from full-line stores and single-brand boutiques to outlets and online shops. Others began as menswear makers and grew into chains of their own stores in shopping malls and on high streets. Flagship stores in Istanbul districts such as Nişantaşı and along the Bosphorus are often named in company histories, and the international shops, franchise partners and showrooms that companies publish give a sense of how far a label has travelled.

Group ownership is part of the picture and needs dated sources. Several labels sit inside holding companies: Boyner Group, built on the Altınyıldız textile business, runs department stores and menswear labels, while Orka Holding owns a family of menswear names. Ownership has changed over time through partnerships with foreign investors and later splits or buybacks, so the date of any ownership statement matters as much as the statement itself.

Corporate pages are the usual starting point for founders, owners and store counts. Company “about” and history pages give founding years, founders’ names and milestones in the company’s own words; national newspapers, news agencies and business press add dated reports on openings, partnerships and changes of control. For a designer, that mix explains why these identities often rest on a group name, a flagship address and a type of garment rather than on a single logo.

Inside an Istanbul group with an Italian partner.

Machka’s ownership follows that of İpekyol. In August 2016 Hürriyet Daily News described the Ayaydın-Miroglio group as founded in 2008 by the Ayaydın Group, the creator of İpekyol, Machka and Twist, in partnership with the Italian company Miroglio. The joint venture’s chairman was Yalçın Ayaydın, with Giuseppe Miroglio as vice chairman, the paper reported.

The group now presents itself as İpekyol Group and lists Machka on its website beside İpekyol and Twist, with Trussardi shown as a brand it distributes. In the February 2025 Ekonomi column, the group’s chief executive, Uğur Ayaydın, referred to the Miroglio partnership as dating back 17 years, which places it in 2008 as well.

On manufacturing, the same 2025 column gave figures for the group as a whole rather than for Machka on its own. Uğur Ayaydın said the group’s factory in Edirne worked about 30 per cent for the group’s own brands and the rest as a contract manufacturer for Turkish and international labels, and that about 70 per cent of the products on the group’s shelves were made in Türkiye.

As of November 2026, the group’s website listed 10 Machka stores in Türkiye and 8 abroad. For scale, the group as a whole told Ekonomi in February 2025 that it had 270 stores in Türkiye and 52 abroad in 13 countries, across all of its labels.

For a design guide, Machka shows how a retail group can borrow a designer’s signature to build a separate, dressier label. Compare İpekyol, its sister brand under the same owners, and Vakko, another Istanbul fashion house. For this guide we use a deep plum, blush and ivory with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Machka’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.