The Belgin Francis atelier turns twenty-five this autumn. This is the story of how it began, what it has become, and what the next quarter-century looks like from inside the workshop.
Before the brand
Belgin Francis trained in fashion design in Istanbul in the 1990s before moving to New York at the end of the decade. Her early work was in tailoring and ready-to-wear; the leather pieces that would eventually define the brand were, at that point, side projects pursued on weekends. The first hand-cut jacket she made for herself drew enough attention from friends and colleagues that the side project began to crowd out the tailoring work.
By the summer of 2001 she had decided to formalize the leather work into a small house of her own. The location was settled — lower Manhattan, in a small studio she could afford. The supplier was settled — a tannery in Tuzla she had visited personally in the spring. The name was settled — her own, because she could not imagine someone else's on the pieces she planned to make. What was not yet settled was when, precisely, to open.
October 2001
The events of September that year reshaped lower Manhattan in ways that affected every small business in the neighborhood. For several weeks the question inside the studio was whether to delay the launch. The conclusion, reached over a long October weekend, was that the work was ready and the city would benefit from new things being made. The atelier opened that month, quietly, with a first collection of twelve pieces.
The first sale came within the first week — a leaf-cut jacket to a buyer for a specialty store on Madison Avenue. The first reorder came two weeks later. By the end of the year the atelier had outgrown the original studio and the workshop in Turkey had grown from one artisan to four.
The first decade
The years from 2002 through 2010 were the period of finding the brand's voice. Several silhouettes that became permanent — the wide-collar tunic, the maxi sleeveless vest, the cropped leaf jacket — were developed in this window. The signature leaf motif evolved from a single botanical sketch into a system that could be applied across multiple silhouettes, scales, and color treatments.
The Turkish workshop expanded steadily. By 2010 the atelier was working with a team of twelve full-time artisans, several of whom remain at the workshop today. The institutional memory of the brand — the knowledge of which leather batches produced which finishes, which laser settings worked for which lambskin grades, which patterns had been tried and abandoned — accumulated in those years and continues to compound.
The shift to mixed production
Around 2008, the atelier introduced laser-cutting alongside the existing hand-cutting work. The decision was not unanimous inside the workshop; the senior hand-cutters argued, reasonably, that the irregularity of the human hand was the entire point of the signature work. The compromise that has held ever since is the one described in an earlier journal piece: laser-cutting for shorter silhouettes and architectural geometric work, hand-cutting for longer silhouettes and statement pieces. Both methods continue, deliberately, side by side.
The second decade
The years from 2011 through 2020 were the period of consolidation. The atelier refined production methods, opened to direct-to-consumer through the website, and built the customer relationships that now define much of the work. Several customers from the first decade became repeat collectors; some of them now own ten or twelve pieces, spanning multiple seasons and silhouettes.
The pandemic years were difficult for the leather industry broadly. The atelier weathered them by leaning into the direct-to-consumer model and by keeping the Turkish workshop running at reduced capacity rather than closing it. Several of the artisans the brand most depends on stayed through that period because they had been with the workshop long enough to consider it home; that loyalty is, in retrospect, one of the quiet advantages of having built the brand slowly.
The current atelier
Today the atelier operates between two locations: the design and curation studio in New York, and the production workshop in Turkey. The two are in constant contact — patterns travel back and forth by photograph multiple times a week, samples by courier monthly, and the team itself by aircraft several times a year.
The current catalog is approximately seventy pieces, spread across jackets, tunics, vests, ponchos, crops, and blouses. Sizing extends from 3XS through 8XL across most silhouettes — a deliberate decision, and one of the things the atelier is quietly proud of. Luxury leather has historically been made for one silhouette of woman; Belgin Francis has tried, season by season, to widen that range.
What comes next
The atelier is approaching its second quarter-century with two convictions intact from the first. The first is that leather should be made by human hands, in workshops that take time, in quantities that respect the leather itself. Nothing in twenty-five years has persuaded the atelier otherwise.
The second is that a brand can be both a luxury house and a small one — that the relationship with the customer who buys a leaf-cut tunic and wears it for fifteen years is more interesting than the relationship with a customer who buys whatever is current and replaces it the following season. The atelier has built its business on the first kind of relationship and intends to continue.
The next collections will continue to develop the signature leaf motif, introduce new silhouettes that fit the current direction of the house wardrobe, and — quietly — expand into adjacent categories the atelier has been considering for some time. None of that will be rushed. It is not, fundamentally, that kind of house.
To see the work as it stands today, browse the full catalog, or read more about the foundational motif in the Leaf signature story.