Georgian Azerbaijani designer Galib Gassanoff is gearing up to show his Fall/Winter 2026 collectsion in Milan on Friday night. But it’s not the only thing on his mind. Two weeks ago, his brand, Institution by Galib Gassanoff, was announced as a semi-finalist for the 2026 LVMH Prize, with the next round taking place during Paris Fashion Week on March 5.
The competition environment is nothing new for Gassanoff. He won the Zalando Visionary Award in Copenhagen in January, securing €50,000 and a fully funded, on-schedule show in the Danish capital for SS27. While industry prizes are known for offering emerging labels a path to scale, Gassanoff’s mission is not to grow the next major luxury house, with hundreds of stores. Instead, he hopes to build a small, considered business that supports the artisans and communities he grew up around.
Ahead of this season’s Milan show, I meet Gassanoff in his temporary studio space, which he’s rented to host castings and appointments, in place of his two-room apartment that doubles as the brand’s HQ. Upon entering, I spot voluminous shearlings, yak wool, feather-light leather and beautifully woven carpet among the FW26 collectsion; as the designer pulls pieces, they are so large that they sometimes require a second pair of hands to show the cut. The intricate garments are produced by rural Georgian and Azerbaijani artisans, and for every look, he tells me the village or the region it was made in as well as the history of the artisans who made it. “Every collectsion has a story and a history, and that’s important,” Gassanoff says. “And I like to keep hand-sewn elements in all the collectsions, which isn’t great for margins.”
But he isn’t too concerned about the numbers for now. Institution by Galib Gassanoff is currently “more of a project” than a business, the designer concedes. Ahead of each collectsion, Gassanoff partners with institutions like Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Culture, or Capital Culture House in Rome, to secure funds in order to spotlight and financially support the artisan communities that produce his pieces, hence the brand name. In addition to this funding, the label has a handful of small stockists: concept stores Antonia (Milan), Escapist (Tbilisi, Georgia) and Rebelle (Osaka, Tokyo), which came on board last year. The Zalando prize money helped Gassanoff pay his rent, keep his one employee and two interns, produce the next collectsion, and compensate the artisans who made it.
Following all this exposure, requests to attend the Institution by Galib Gassanoff show have surged since last season. “We’ve had to say no to a lot of people for the show,” he says. “We are limiting our guests a lot, because I love having an audience that understands what I do. They should understand the craftsmanship and story and history behind it, rather than being about glamor and trends and influencers.”
Rural beginnings
After growing up in rural Georgia, Gassanoff gained access to the internet as a teen, the same time he began taking trips to the country’s capital. It was Tbilisi that opened him up to the world of fashion, and to the possibility of being a designer. After entering — and winning — the Georgian Fashion Council’s BeNext contest in 2013, aged 18, Gassanoff headed to Milan to study at the Haute Future Fashion Academy (HFFA), the award prize. But when he started interning in 2016, he found it difficult to win favor without being part of the ‘scene’.
“It’s difficult in the fashion industry if you are not a part of the circle,” Gassanoff says. “I was never part of the circle because I prefer being backstage and creating what I want to do, instead of partying and going around and making friends that aren’t real — that didn’t help at all at the beginning of my career.”
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Frustrated with internships, Gassanoff and his HFFA classmate Luca Lin set out on their own. They launched luxury label Act No.1 in 2016, building a robust business with 50 stockists, a shiny office, and 15 employees. But for Gassanoff, it became overwhelming. “As the business got busier, it got heavier and heavier,” he says. “There came a time that I wanted to do something that is more authentic to myself. I didn’t like the system — and I [still] don’t like the system — so I quit.”
He and Lin parted ways as good friends in 2024; while the latter continued with Act No.1, Gassanoff launched Institution. Ironically, after years of applying as a duo, Lin’s Act No.1 is also in the running for this year’s LVMH Prize, after the designers supported each other during the application process. “We were at the entrance of [men’s trade show] Pitti Uomo in Florence screaming with happiness,” Gassanoff says. “It was double happiness for me.”
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Whether he wins the LVMH Prize — “the highest honor in fashion” — or not, Gassanoff’s goal is to build a small brand, and stay focused on his central mission. “I don’t want to be distracted by many things that are happening around me in fashion,” he says. “There’s this trend or that, AI, so much information thrown at us. I want to create clothes by hand. If I have a platform, I want to tell a story that no one from my community has told.”
The artisanal way
The process for each Institution collectsion is similar. Gassanoff is aware of the communities in Georgia and Azerbaijan that each have different artisanal specialties. He will visit them in-person to explore their craft and workshop with them to see if they can create pieces for his collectsions. It’s a collaborative process: the designer approaches the artisans with an idea, but is open to their thoughts.
The approach is not without its practical challenges. “The communities are not always reliable in the terms of deadlines and timing, and because they don’t have an atelier, I can’t just give them orders. They have to also want to do it,” Gassanoff explains. “They have household things to do, so we can’t give them strict deadlines, even if it’s nine months before we start working on it. Sometimes, they don’t answer the phone, sometimes we can’t get to them because of weather conditions, or they don’t have electricity.” Gassanoff emphasizes the need to remain flexible, planning collectsions many months in advance to ensure there are enough show pieces.
If Gassanoff wants to preserve the current production process and hand-sewn ethos, Institution must maintain a modest size. But he also wants to scale in order to work with more communities, so he has to, in some ways, play the game.
The brand will host its first sales showrooms in Paris for FW26. After two days at the LVMH showroom, it will decamp to a gallery in Le Marais for five more, to hopefully secure some international wholesale accounts. “We are open to stockists,” Gassanoff says. “Of course, production is limited. We can’t produce a lot. And a couple of pieces are really expensive because they require 20 days of hand dyeing or stitching.”
Already, Gassanoff is developing a small fan community of art collectsors and entrepreneurs, who do bespoke orders and are reflective of his long-term business goals. “Made-to-measure is the best business model for us, and I see a future in that,” Gassanoff says. “But at the moment, we don’t have much condition to have fittings in a two-room apartment.”
His dream is to move from “project” to fully fledged business, without reaching the size or level of pressure associated with his previous brand. “I want to build my idea of a business model,” he says. “I don’t want thousands of pieces. I want a fan base that respects what I do, to have a conversation with them, and to go forward and be able to create.”
