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The last time Ukrainian Fashion Week (UFW) took place in Kyiv it was 2022, before Russia invaded the capital city and started the ongoing war. But now, after three seasons of decamping to London, Paris, Copenhagen or Berlin, Ukraine’s designers are about to show their collections on home soil from 1 to 4 September.
“There is no right time,” says Tetyana Chumak, founder of womenswear label TG Botanical, which has shown in Copenhagen for five seasons, since before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as she wanted to align her responsibly sourced, upcycled brand with Copenhagen’s robust sustainability credentials. “We have been doing everything possible to ensure that Ukrainian brands and Ukraine itself remain visible on the global stage,” she says. “Of course, it’s not time for parties, but it’s time for shows and presentations and supporting our industry in Ukraine as best as we can.”
Featuring around 50 brands, including internationally renowned names like Ksenia Schnaider and Ruslan Baginskiy, UFW will be centred around the Mystetskyi Arsenal National Art and Culture Museum, where most shows and presentations are due to take place. Major brands including Mini and Kronenbourg are sponsoring, with Ukraine’s First Lady Olena Zelenska, a proponent of Ukrainian fashion, having made a promotional video to endorse the event.
“First and foremost, we are doing it for Ukrainian designers and the Ukrainian fashion industry,” says founder and CEO of Ukrainian Fashion Week Iryna Danylevska. “Journalists cover military events and tragedies that constantly take place in Ukraine. We wanted to speak in a different language and for the world to see us, hear us, and appreciate our resilience,” she says. “We expect Ukrainian Fashion Week will have a lot of attention from media and social media and it’s going to be a source of inspiration for the whole nation.”
Safety concerns
While the bulk of the fighting remains in Ukraine’s Eastern regions, there’s always the risk of air strikes in Kyiv, UFW organisers and designers acknowledge. The most recent air strike, on 8 July, struck a children’s hospital in the city. Forty-four people were killed, according to Reuters. (Russia denied carrying out the attack.)
The strike hit 500m away from Ukrainian brand Frolov’s production studio. “We felt the weight of the attack from our walls,” says founder Ivan Frolov. “The war is of course always a challenge, but as long as we’re doing this, I understand that there is nothing impossible for my team and for Ukrainians in general. And for us, this is the new normal, we have to continue.”
For safety during Ukrainian Fashion Week, there are bunkers on the main site, and at all external venues chosen by designers, there’s a bomb shelter “no more than 500m away”, Danylevska says. It’s a stirring reminder of the current reality in Kyiv. “We hope that all the brands on the schedule will not be interrupted by the air raid sirens and missile attacks and that they can introduce and present their collections,” Danylevska says.
There’s also practical challenges with the “new normal”. The vast majority of attendees will be from Ukraine, as the country remains on the red travel list or under travel warning for most major countries including the US, the UK and China. In the absence of international buyers, for the brands showing, UFW is about showing strength and boosting awareness of the Ukrainian fashion industry to the international press, while securing some orders from domestic buyers.
A lack of air connections to Ukraine makes deliveries costly and time consuming, while energy restrictions mean brands have to use generators to run their production studios. This is energy intensive and “super expensive, eating into profit margins”, Frolov says. That said, designers have found producing a show in Kyiv somewhat smoother because of the support and excitement of the local community and their familiarity with the city, compared with the cities they have shown in during the war.
Returning to the homeland
Frolov, a firm favourite of Sabrina Carpenter, hasn’t shown in Ukraine since 2020, when the pandemic broke out. Following the invasion, the brand decamped to London Fashion Week, where it has shown for the last three seasons. Frolov now has 17 stockists. But without the resources to move operations to another country, the designer and his teams remained in Ukraine, continuing to run their label from their studio in Kyiv. As the war wages on, far longer than he’d hoped, Frolov feels it’s time to return to showing in the capital, with a special performance show based on a Ukrainian fairytale Ivasyk-Telesyk. He has invited Ukraine’s artistic community, including film and theatre directors, artists and makeup artists, to celebrate the local arts industry.
“At the beginning of the war, we felt like fashion week should return after [Ukraine’s] victory, but one year ago we, [the Ukrainian fashion community], felt we must do something,” Frolov says. The goal is to show the international fashion community that these brands are still operating from Ukraine. “To continue is our way to survive. This is our way to continue communicating with the world.”
For all the designers at UFW, producing shows and presentations in Kyiv is a major shift from their recent show experiences. Ukrainian brand Bobkova last showed there five years ago. Since 2022, the brand has shown in Berlin (with the support of the Berlin Senate Department for Economics, Energy and Public Enterprises, which funds young local designers) and is now stocked at 10 stores — but the plan was always to return to Kyiv.
“We’re so excited to show in our homeland,” says founder Kristina Bobkova. “We want to develop, sell more, and, very importantly, we want to open up new international markets. We hope that Ukrainian designers will get orders on the new collections that will be introduced at UFW in Kyiv.”
Bobkova’s show will be based on Ukrainian mythology, spotlighting historic female figures like the mythological spirit Mavka, “to help spread Ukrainian culture” to local guests but also international people watching from afar. The show will take place in St Sophia Cathedral, which “is like a bomb shelter”, Bobkova adds, “safety is of course a concern”. Production has also been tricky. The craftsmen who would previously work with Bobkova on jewellery, for example, are now on the front line, she says — “we’ve lost so much of the workforce.”
Boosting the domestic fashion market
As well as raising awareness of Ukrainian fashion abroad, UFW aims to boost the domestic fashion market in Ukraine, with a focus on local buyers and stores, organisers say. “After the start of the Russian invasion, there was a dramatic decrease in the domestic fashion market. But now we can see the situation is slowly getting better,” says Danylevska. “Our aim is to support and to scale the domestic market as well. We are looking forward to new contacts, to new orders within Ukraine.”
UFW has invited Ukrainian buyers from the West of Ukraine, in regions like Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk and Uzhhorod, who “supported Ukrainian brands during the war by selling them intensively”, Danylevska says. After the invasion, a lot of Ukrainians left their homes in the Eastern parts of the country and relocated to the Western regions, which were safer at that time. Additionally, many large companies, manufacturers and brands relocated to the West, which further stimulated support for local fashion stores and helped sustain the activity of Ukrainian brands. “They opened their boutiques and showrooms in the Western Ukraine and they supported the industry. Even in this extremely challenging and tough time, stores created new opportunities for Ukrainian designers to get orders and be sold locally. Now, we invite them to UFW to say thank you.”
Womenswear brand Litkovska is one of Ukraine’s most prominent exports, with 40 stockists across 16 countries. It’s been on the official Paris Fashion Week calendar since 2017 and has also carried out presentations and exhibitions in Copenhagen, Berlin and London since the invasion, as fashion councils across Europe rallied around Ukrainian brands and invited them to present. While, arguably, founder Lilia Litkovska doesn’t need to show in Ukraine to boost business, she wanted to return to her roots, creating a special installation just a stone’s throw away from where she works with her 50-strong team.
“My production is here, my team is here, I developed the collection in Kyiv, and I developed my business here,” Litkovska says. For UFW, she will present an entirely new format, creating an installation on “the dialogue between Paris and Ukraine”, with funding from the Ukrainian government. She’s tight-lipped on the details, but the exhibition will take place on 4 September on the site of the brand’s new flagship store in Kyiv, opening later this year. She’ll then repeat the activation in Paris at the end of September. “The reason to open a flagship store in Kyiv now is very simple — I believe in my country, in my people, in growing our business and building our lives here,” Litkovska says.
Frolov is also keen to boost awareness and connect with the local community. He’s invited artists, film directors and creatives from across Ukraine to the show, and also hopes to connect with local buyers to gain domestic stockists. But moreover, he says, this fashion week is about the message. “It’s not just about the clothes, about the show, it’s about connecting with big media that can show the world very important topics, show them what’s going on in Ukraine and reflect all the truths,” he says. “So that’s why for us it’s such an important event, to support the industry, but at the same time to communicate with the world.”
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