While I was researching emerging brands and overlooked fashion scenes back in 2018 and 2019, for Maison Orient, I came across MBFW in Tbilisi, Georgia. Until that point I had been to all the usual fashion weeks and had heard of a few smaller ones around Europe, but Tbilisi Fashion Week was completely new to me.
So I contacted their PR department, introduced Maison Orient, which was not even launched yet, and asked to be invited as a buyer.
Another moment of taking a chance on each other.
A month later I had booked my trip. I had never been to Georgia and I knew nothing about Georgian designers, but my research was enough to get me excited to go and discover. And let me tell you, I was not disappointed.
I ended up in one of the best design hotels I have ever stayed in, to this day: the Stamba Hotel. I have been back four times since, and I am dreaming about the next one.
The venues were one of the highlights of the whole week. Each one was a different corner of the city, understated and completely unexpected. The creativity there is on another level, just waiting to be discovered.
And the street style! I think we can all agree that street style is half the hype of any fashion week, and deserves as much lens time as the runways themselves. Tbilisi has some of the most raw, unpretentiously creative street style I have seen anywhere.
MBFW Tbilisi is Sofia Tchkonia's platform, launched in 2015, and it turned Tbilisi into the buyer destination of the post-Soviet region. I managed to go three times after that first visit, and then Covid came and it went dark for several years. It came back this past May, I have not been back yet but actually can not wait to go again.
The designers I met there are beyond talented: Dalood, Lako Bukia, Janashia, Materialist, Liya, and many more.
From my years in Paris at LVMH I was lucky enough to attend a lot of PFW shows, and I still love being back in Paris every fashion week. But there is something else entirely about standing in a room where only a handful of people are present, taking it all in, and getting to be part of a whole new scene as it happens.
That is really why I do this. Not to be in the front row of the shows everyone is already watching, but to get on a plane to a city I know nothing about and come back with names most people have not heard yet. Tbilisi gave me that, and it keeps giving it and will forever remain as one of my favorite cities and fashion weeks to go to.
I will be writing about some of the Georgian designers properly in the coming letters, because each of them deserves more than a name in a list so stay tuned for the next letter!
xx
Ayse
Discover the Georgian designers stocked at Maison Orient, including Dalood and 0711 Tbilisi, or meet all 39 designers on our designers page.