Ukrainian Fashion Week arrives in Kyiv from September 2 to 6, bringing fifty designers to the city. The lineup is anchored by PASKAL, who opens the week, alongside POUSTOVIT, FROLOV, The COAT by Katya Silchenko, GASANOVA, J’AMEMME, GUNIA Project, and KSENIASCHNAIDER. KACHOROVSKA returns to host an emerging designers’ prize, offering a platform for upcoming talent while signaling that established names are actively investing in what comes next.

The centerpiece is Behind the Craft at Mystetskyi Arsenal, curated by GUNIA Project’s Maria Gavryliuk and Natalia Kamenska. The exhibition gathers over 70 pieces that trace how Ukrainian designers engage with traditional artisanal techniques such as embroidery, weaving, beadwork, and textile manipulation. Here, craft becomes more than an aesthetic choice: it connects a new generation of Ukrainian design to traditions whose preservation has taken on renewed urgency.

The week opens with a program at TSUM Kyiv addressing the practical realities of operating a fashion business today. The sessions explore domestic sales strategies, international expansion, and the mechanics of connecting marketing to revenue. Later in the week, the “Faces of Heroes” initiative, developed in partnership with the YANKO Charitable Foundation, will raise funds for reconstructive surgeries for Ukrainian defenders, extending the fashion week’s impact beyond the runway.

The designers showing this week are thinking about identity, how craft preserves culture, and what it means to keep building when circumstances suggest otherwise. The week documents an industry that refuses to stop amid war, using fashion as a language for survival, resilience, and the determination to shape the future on its own terms.