The Ukrainian Fashion Week (UFW) will last for 7 days and involves 102 designers, 54 shows, 24 locations, and 19 special projects.
By tradition, Lilia Pustovit will open the event and Oleksii Zalevsky will close its first day.
There will be two catwalks on the UFW’s main location at Mystetsky Arsenal (MA): the main catwalk and one in MA’s right wing. Besides, we have seen the UFW expand its “space” in the past few seasons: designers organize their own shows in various places of Kyiv, such as Circus, schools, and parking lots. This season is no exception.
For example, Andre Tan will present a two-hour show at the Left Bank Exhibition Center to mark the 15th anniversary of his brand on October 10. The designer is still charting the program, but, according to organizers, his spring-summer collection will include the masculine line. Besides, he will show a retrospective collection of the apparel he has designed in the past 15 years.
This year, there will be a day-long Fresh Fashion event to introduce six new brands and show 10 young designers on October 17 at the Parkovy Congress and Exhibition Center.
UFW organizers say the fashion space reacts very quickly to global sociopolitical and economic changes. They claim this is why they love fashion and highly esteem the intuition and talent of designers.
But designers do not respond to global cataclysms with creative work alone. Changes in the rules by which fashion has been playing in the past few decades seem to be chaos to some and a revolution to others. There are endless changes in so many things, such as lines, brand collaboration, priority of markets, designers at Houses of Fashion, marketing and advertising strategies, etc.
The aim of this “fashion revolution” is more pragmatic than it may seem. Fashion is striving to improve sales and draw the attention and fanaticism of the masses. But, frankly speaking, fashion is very successfully performing its mission to generate and mirror changes.
Organizers are sure that the new campaign, conceived by the UFW’s creative tandem earlier in the spring, has visualized as best it could the understanding of the current moment: “Only nature is the embodiment of continuous changes. Who but young people can shatter stereotypes? New things should be welcomed with unbridled expressiveness only. It is fashionable to be ‘living,’ bold, and responsive to changes. Who but ambitious Ukrainian young people can show the world this audacity?”
