Alperen Aslan Unveils Soie, a 35m Concept With No Shipyard Yet

What is Soie, and why does it matter for Alperen Aslan?

Soie is a 35-metre yacht concept that Alperen Aslan revealed on 1 September 2026, his second full concept since he debuted the 65-metre Avora earlier in the year. She is styled and rendered, not yet engineered or attached to any shipyard.

Aslan took the name from the French word for silk, and says the concept is built around translating the fluid movement and soft drape of woven silk into a hull and superstructure. The result is a hull with monolithic dark-glass bands running its length and a distinguishing vertical bow, together giving Soie a bolder, more athletic silhouette than the rounded-bow, split-window styling that dominates the 30 to 40-metre bracket right now, a size range where full-custom yards such as Heesen and Sanlorenzo, and semi-custom builders such as Numarine and Sunreef, already compete hard for the same buyers. Aslan has also worked to keep the exterior surfaces clean: air-intake vents that a lot of yachts leave as visible slots are integrated into the hull lines instead of cut across them, a detail more often associated with a builder's in-house design office than an outside pitch.

The technical description released alongside the renderings names a semi-displacement hull, chosen for stability at low speed without giving up agility once she is running, and a zero-speed stabiliser system to hold that comfort at anchor. Those are real engineering choices rather than styling flourishes, but they are also the only technical details published. No engine make or count, no speed figures, no range and no tank capacities have been given, which is normal at this stage of a concept's life but worth being clear about before anyone reads more into Soie than a design has earned so far.

What does the Soie concept offer inside and out?

Soie is laid out for up to ten guests across five cabins, headlined by a main-deck master suite with its own dressing room and a mechanical fold-out balcony built into the hull.

Outside, the concept puts an integrated jacuzzi on the flybridge next to a private foredeck lounge, and gives the stern a beach club with a hydraulic swim platform - three of the exterior spaces owners now expect as standard on a 35-metre rather than as an option list. The more distinctive element is the master suite's fold-out hull balcony: a panel in the hull itself opens outward at anchor to create an open-air terrace off the bedroom, a mechanism a handful of yards now offer on much larger yachts but rarely at this length. On a real build, that kind of moving hull panel adds engineering cost and hull penetrations that a naval architect has to sign off on, which is one more reason the absence of one on Soie is worth flagging rather than skipping past.

Inside, the design leans on soft recessed LED lighting and floating furniture with rounded edges rather than hard angles, and the main saloon is drawn as an open-plan entertaining space with custom marble coffee tables and an integrated television unit doubling as a room divider. The master suite itself carries a marble-clad en suite bathroom and a dedicated dressing area, in keeping with what Aslan describes as an elegant, contemporary design philosophy rather than the more overtly futuristic language he used on Avora.

Who is Alperen Aslan, and has he built a yacht before?

Alperen Aslan is a 24-year-old Turkish designer who worked as a project designer at ARES Shipyard before founding his own studio, and Soie is his second full concept after the 65-metre Avora - neither has a shipyard attached yet.

Aslan graduated from Maltepe Universitesi in January 2022 and went on to work as a project designer at ARES Shipyard, an Antalya Free Zone yard that builds military and commercial vessels, where his work covered as-built drawings, class and flag documentation and exterior design on defence projects before he set up his own studio, still based in Antalya. His prior work has already been recognised outside the yacht press: a design called the Ursa Catamaran Yacht won him a Marine and Yacht Vessel Iron Award from the A' Design Award and Competition, a juried international design prize that is not yacht-specific but does carry real outside scrutiny rather than being a marketing badge a studio can simply claim.

Soie follows Avora, a 65-metre concept Aslan unveiled earlier in 2026 built around what he called a bio-fusion philosophy, combining organic forms with Ancient Egyptian craftsmanship references, and laid out for 12 guests across six cabins on an 11.6-metre beam. Avora generated real coverage across the yacht press when it launched, but no shipyard, naval architect or client has been named for it since, and there is no public sign that a hull is being built. Soie arrives from the same studio, at the same pre-engineering stage, several months later.

What is missing before Soie could actually be ordered?

No naval architecture firm, no engine or performance figures, no gross tonnage and no shipyard have been named for Soie, which means nobody can order her yet - only look at the pitch for one.

A finished superyacht concept usually carries two signatures: a designer's, for the way it looks, and a naval architect's, for the way it will actually float, move and hold together. Soie has the first and not the second. Compare that with a platform like Numarine's new Classic Line, unveiled in the same window: five outside studios were commissioned to style two hulls, but those hulls sit on naval architecture from Umberto Tagliavini and a yard, Numarine, that already builds and delivers boats. Soie has no equivalent partner named, which puts her a full stage earlier than a platform concept from an active builder.

That earlier stage is not unusual, and it is not automatically a dead end either. Independent studios do reach a hull this way: Sinot Yacht Architecture and Design built its relationship with Benetti through a custom project, the FB255 Formosa, in 2011 and has designed for the yard repeatedly since, and Cassetta Yacht Designers has worked with Benetti for more than a decade, including the 107.6-metre FB272 Luminosity. Both of those partnerships, though, trace back to a specific yard picking up a specific design - not a designer's own renders alone. Aslan's Iron Award and his run of two full concepts in under a year say something real about his output, but the honest next question for anyone genuinely interested in Soie is simply whether she has attracted a construction partner. As of this week, neither Soie nor Avora has one, and a reader should treat a render with no naval architect and no shipyard letter of intent as a pitch, not a build.