Situationist. Fall 2025 - Paris Fashion Week.

It has been over 6 years since I have reviewed the independent Georgian fashion brand Situationist, co-created by Irakli Rusadze and Davit Giorgadze who debuted their tailored avant-garde collection at Tbilisi Fashion Week in 2017.  Both Rusadze and Giorgadze have emphasised that Situationist, named after the late 1950s French counterculture art political movement, to be very much a political statement, in all of its Eastern European charm, as a reflection of what it means to live under oppression within Georgia.   

As mentioned numerously, the avant-garde trend of the early 2000s has pretty much ended.  Due specifically to a lot of independent designers and their labels no longer being viable to create, which for the most part the fashion industry now is almost completely conglomerate driven, with those hopeful desires of being acquired, bought out or have collaborations with major sports brands also becoming a rarity.  And the creatives of fashion over 25 years ago, have shrunk down to only handful of independent designers still standing, as Billionaire dollar holding companies like Kering and LVMH, have all but cornered the fashion industry, whilst churning through their creative directors like no tomorrow on the back of falling sales and share prices.  Which, in the end, doesn't leave an independent brand much room to move.

Rusadze and Giorgadze held their Fall 2025 collection at this year's Paris Fashion Week via Geoffroy Lauzet's x ANDAM Fashion Awards Paris 'Run' emerging designer space, set up in 2024 to assist up and coming designers to showcase their collections.  Run allows these shows, and showrooms to be open to the general public, rather than the VIP invite for the larger fashion shows during Paris Fashion Week.  

However, Situationist is no post graduate fashion brand.  Rusadze and Giorgadze have almost a decade of showcasing their collections, through the many 'underground' Tbilisi Fashion Week runway shows, to their seasonal lookbooks.  And it's very evident that their skills in crafting their slicker ode to Eastern European uniformity, under its avant-garde prose, is gaining momentum.   With friends and fellow creatives from Georgia adorning Rusadze and Giorgadze's latest styles at the Run showrooms, displaying an array of bondage esque looks, mixed with tough dominatrix carnal styles in all of its direct and unforgiven precision.   

However, The Fall 2025 collection is not groundbreaking, yet after ten years Rusadze and Giorgadze have held their line, and not compromised to the greater industry pressure.  By developing their boxy, and at times unruly looks as very much a well crafted protest.  And so far, with Fashion creatively shrinking, without a counterculture on the horizon to shore it up, and more importantly to challenge a Fascist sitting at the Oval office in Washington.   We may indeed look to Eastern Europe for clues on how to organise revolt, be it through fashion, music and action.  Even it does, paradoxically, include earning some money on the side. 

But, at least you don't have to worry about a share price fluctuation which will affect your job prospects, such is the growing threat of corporatism, for everyone. 

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(A.Glass 2025)