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Merve Yesilada, 22, who is working on a soon-to-open gallery and design store, Haaz, with interiors by Sami Hayek (brother of Hollywood's Salma) was having breakfast at the laid-back Assk café, right on the waterfront, with her friend Lerna Tutunciyan, 29, who works as a production assistant. Talk turned to head scarves, a particularly thorny issue given Turkish history. (While the traditional male Islamic headgear, the fez, was banned by law in 1925, the head scarf had simply fallen out of use.) Yesilada, who loves to mix Marc Jacobs and Gucci with TopShop pieces, thinks that head scarves should be tolerated. "After all, I wear hats. But I get concerned when I see someone veiled in black," she adds. "That's just not what this country is."
Erdem Moralioglu, a Canadian of Turkish descent whose Erdem label is sold at Harrods in London and Barneys New York, says the thing one always has to keep in mind about Istanbul is that for everything you think you've learned, you'll find the opposite to be true. "It's about the dichotomy of contrast, old and new, cosmopolitan and yet so ancient. I remember as a boy getting lost in the bazaar and then stumbling into a McDonald's."