By Gabriela Afanador
Friday 7, August 2026
Photo via @Institution_official on Instagram
Institution is a Milan-based label founded by Galib Gassanoff in 2024, built around a single idea: the craft traditions of Georgia and Azerbaijan are disappearing, and fashion might be one of the few spaces where they can be kept alive. Gassanoff grew up in an Azerbaijani community in Tbilisi and has spent years working directly with artisans from the region, learning techniques that only a handful of people still know how to execute. There are, he has said, only five or six women in his region still weaving carpets the traditional way. That research is not the backstory of the brand. It is the brand.
Before Institution, Gassanoff spent nearly a decade co-designing Act N°1 with Luca Lin, a label that grew into a commercially oriented and internationally recognized operation. When he left in 2023 it was a deliberate decision to work differently, slower, more by hand, and more directly connected to the specific craft heritage he had always been drawn to. Institution launched the following year and its debut was presented at Secci Art Gallery in Milan with pieces hung on walls rather than walked on a runway, because from the beginning Gassanoff has thought of what he makes as objects as much as clothes. Most pieces are built by his own hands. Every one is limited not by marketing strategy but by the genuine constraints of making things the way he makes them, which cannot be accelerated or scaled without becoming something else entirely.
The material at the center of the brand’s practice is cotton shoelaces, which is either the most surprising or the most obvious choice depending on how you think about it. Gassanoff has been drawn to them since his earliest work, partly because his parents owned a shoe shop and the material was always present, but more specifically because weaving shoelaces on the body using a technique adapted from Azerbaijani carpet-making allows him to create the fabric and the garment simultaneously. There is no cutting involved, no pattern, no need for seams or pleats. The textile is built directly to the body’s exact dimensions, which gives the resulting pieces a density and a structural quality that is entirely unlike anything produced through conventional construction. The technique is also a direct continuation of a craft tradition that would otherwise disappear entirely, which is the whole point of everything Institution does.
This year Gassanoff won the Zalando Visionary Award 2026, beating out finalists Kyle Ho and Milk of Lime, and is simultaneously a finalist for the LVMH Prize, two of the most significant recognitions available to an emerging designer and both arriving in the same season. Copenhagen Fashion Week gave him a runway slot on August 5th as part of the Zalando award, along with €50,000 in prize money and €35,000 in production support. He showed 30 looks, which is always his limit and which is a deliberate creative position. The runway is a platform for ideas and stories, he has said, not a commercial presentation, and 30 looks is enough to tell the story he wants to tell without padding it out for the sake of a longer show.
The Show
The set said everything before a single look appeared. Traditional Azerbaijani and Georgian carpets were laid end to end along the full length of the runway, their deep reds, ochres, and geometric patterns running beneath every model from the first exit to the last. Every look in the collection walked directly across them, the ancient textiles underfoot and the contemporary garments above them in a relationship that was impossible to miss once you understood what you were looking at.
This was not a decorative choice. The carpet is the exact textile tradition that Institution’s practice comes from, the same weaving knowledge, the same labor-intensive hand-knotting techniques, the same Caucasian craft heritage that Gassanoff has spent years working to document and preserve. Bringing the carpets into the room and having the entire show walk across them meant that the audience sat alongside the source material for the duration of the collection. By the time the finale arrived, everyone in the room understood what had been lying under their feet the entire time, which is exactly the kind of quiet and specific statement that Institution makes better than most brands manage with considerably more noise.
The venue itself reinforced the approach. A light-filled space with floor-to-ceiling glass looking out onto greenery, clean and uncluttered, the carpets and the clothes the only things in the room asking for attention. The casting was diverse and the movement was unhurried, models walking with the kind of deliberate pace that heavy draped garments require and that gave each look the time it needed to read properly.
The Clothes
Photo via @Institution_official on Instagram
The palette across the entire 30-look collection was almost entirely neutral. Warm grey, taupe, camel, cream, off-white, and white dominated throughout, with one quieter section in a soft grey-blue that provided the only chromatic shift in the lineup. The decision to strip color out almost completely is one Gassanoff makes consistently and for a specific reason. When there is nothing else to look at, the eye goes directly to the construction, to how the fabric sits and folds and behaves on the body, to how much weight it carries and what it does when someone moves. Color would compete with that. Neutrals serve it.
Draping was the dominant construction language of the collection and it ran through virtually every look in a different iteration. Large planes of fabric gathered and folded at the shoulder and fell across the body in a way that looked effortless but required significant precision in the cutting and placement of each piece to achieve. The opening grey look, with its deep horizontal folds gathering at the waist before releasing into wide-leg trousers below, established the register of the entire collection immediately. The fabric was heavy enough to hold its own form without any internal structure, which is the single most important variable in draped garment construction and the thing that separates a piece that looks considered from one that simply looks unfinished. These were very much the former.
The shoelace weaving appeared throughout in pieces that rewarded close attention. A white open-weave cardigan with deeply ruffled shoelace-woven panels running the full length of each sleeve brought a completely different surface quality to the otherwise smooth collection, the dense hand-woven texture reading as almost coral-like from a distance and revealing its precise construction only up close. This is consistent with how Institution’s craft-based pieces work across collections, generous at a distance and even more generous when you get close enough to understand how they were made. A sheer grey-blue wrap shirt, its weave fine enough to read as almost translucent in the light of the venue, was belted loosely at the waist and worn over wide black trousers, one of the collection’s quieter and more wearable moments but carrying the same handmade intelligence as the more elaborate pieces around it.
The voluminous white looks were the collection’s most discussed and most visually striking, and seeing them in the images makes it immediately clear why. A fully gathered floor-length coat in fine cotton was pulled so densely at the shoulders and chest that it expanded outward from the body in an almost spherical volume before releasing all the way to the floor. The gathering was so extreme and so precise that the resulting silhouette looked almost architectural, the model’s face emerging from the gathered neckline with a stillness that gave the whole thing a quality somewhere between a garment and a sculpture. Another version achieved the same effect through slightly more controlled gathering, the volume more deliberate and the overall silhouette a shade more structured, like a cloud that had been given opinions about its own shape. A third used the same principle but with a fabric that had a slight sheen to it, the gathered volume catching the light differently and adding another layer of visual complexity to a look that was already doing a great deal.
The hooded camel coat was one of the single strongest pieces in the entire collection. Gathered at the hood and at the shoulders, it fell in deep folds all the way to the floor with drawstring ties at the waist that cinched the volume inward before releasing it again below, creating a silhouette that moved between constraint and expansion as the model walked. The weight and drape of the fabric, which appeared to be a dense cotton or technical canvas, gave the coat a presence that photographs do not fully capture. Worn over boots and nothing else visible beneath it, the look had a completeness and a confidence that made it one of those pieces you look at and immediately understand why a designer makes clothes. The model carrying it walked with the particular unhurried stillness that heavy draped garments require and the combination of the camel fabric, the carpet-lined runway, and the glass and greenery of the venue behind her was one of the most visually coherent moments of Copenhagen Fashion Week this season.
The collection was entirely genderless, not as a positioning statement or a trend response but because the construction logic itself does not start from a gendered body. The silhouettes expand at the top and fall freely below, the draping and gathering creating volume that surrounds the body rather than conforming to it, which means the clothes work across bodies without needing to be adjusted or reinterpreted for different wearers. Male, female, and non-binary models walked the same looks, and the looks read identically on all of them because the garments are not asking the body to be anything specific. This is the most genuine expression of genderless fashion that the concept allows, and it comes not from a brand statement but from the way the clothes are actually built.
Why It Matters
Copenhagen Fashion Week requires every brand on its official schedule to meet 19 binding sustainability standards, including sourcing at least 50 percent of materials sustainably, never destroying unsold stock, and producing entirely zero-waste runway sets. Institution’s practice, built on natural fibers, deadstock sourcing from high-end producers, and the preservation of craft techniques that generate no industrial waste by definition, meets those requirements not as compliance but as the natural outcome of how the label has always worked. The fit between Institution and Copenhagen Fashion Week is not coincidental. It is structural.
What Gassanoff is doing sits at an intersection that fashion talks about constantly and occupies rarely, between cultural preservation and contemporary design, between the object and the garment, between a practice rooted in endangered craft and a runway show at one of Europe’s most internationally watched fashion weeks. The carpets on the floor, the shoelace weaving on the bodies walking above them, and the artisans back in Georgia and Azerbaijan who still know how to do this: it all connects, and at Institution the connection is not a narrative the brand tells about itself. It is visible in every single piece.