LJUBLJANA FASHION WEEK 16TH EDITION : A BACKSTAGE STORY BY ANJA SMAKA

Ljubljana Fashion Week has always been the incredibly stylish odd cousin of Europe’s glossy fashion circuit, a place where designers gleefully reject polish in favour of raw experimentation. But this October, the city went full delirious genius. Forget “wearability.” The question this season was: Can clothing be an emotional outburst, a conceptual puzzle, and a public crisis all at once?

Short answer: abso-fucking-lutely.

Ljubljana is a capital serving big, chaotic, fashion-kid energy as Ljubljana Fashion Week wrapped its 16th edition on October 20th in the Glass Hall. Which felt less like a runway venue and more like a portal where Central Europe’s fashion crowd collectively exhaled, “Yes, we can do weird, smart, sustainable, and sexy all at once.”

This season felt like a manifesto more than ever before.  Fashion should be fun. Fashion should be strange. Fashion should make you squint and say, “Wait… what?” And Ljubljana Fashion Week delivered exactly that, joyfully, defiantly, beautifully.

SARIVALENCI blew the roof off with Meringue, a surreal, cake-bodied fever dream set to Aqua’s “Doctor Jones.” Puffy silhouettes, everyday layers, youth-culture attitude, part street rebel, part pastry mascot, all poking at body norms with a sugary snarl.

With Matic Veler, pieces aren’t clothes, they’re rebellious textile sculptures that could practically loiter on their own. Matched with Marmo Arredo’s ancient-marble attitude, the collection crashes stone weight into high-tech fabric magic, serving bold, trippy, sculptural drama.

One of the most talked-about looks of the week came from Szarvas Valentin, who may or may not hate the human torso. Imagine a giant, boiled-wool creature with cutouts that feel more like bite marks than openings. Valentin showcased his designs as part of the BCEFW Collective show in partnership with LJFW, presenting three extremely talented Hungarian brands: Szarvas Valentin, WINNA and FANNILSZ.

For Szarvas, clothing is more than functional; it’s a medium between body and presence. His work often reflects on emotional and social themes; this wasn’t knitwear; it was knit-chaos. The garment looked as if it had been caught halfway through a teleportation glitch. Sleeves morphed into knots, holes appeared where no holes should be, and the whole thing radiated “I slept two hours and dreamt of a sweater swallowing me.” Ljubljana adored it.

Then came the blue look from Zoja Muhič, a hypnotic, scale-like eruption of satin circles layered so thickly they created their own micro-climate. The model looked like a cosmic mermaid priestess rising from a digital lagoon, glowing with that “I am both human and aquatic WiFi router” aura.

The headpiece? A swirling halo of translucent loops that caught the light and sent it ricocheting across the room like fashion-grade sonar. Was it wearable? Who cares? It was spellbinding. The audience practically levitated.

Lan Krebs turned a humble jersey into shapeshifting sculptures. His seamless tubular knits, no front, no back, no boundaries, proved sustainability can be strange, smart, and seriously seductive.

Then Things I Miss | INSTINKT – BLOOM (IN) drifted in like a sensory spell. Tina Princ’s raw-to-reborn performance mixed sound, movement, and nature’s cycles into a second-skin dreamscape of blooming, fading, and returning.

ÆMONA’s PANTSA RHEI was all about constant change, your clothes shifting right along with you. Pants fade, bodies evolve, identities swirl. Born in Ljubljana, the brand blends old craft with modern spark, turning everyday pieces into little conceptual mood swings.

Whilst Ludus’s Decalog was the tenth drop in its genderless journey. Still serene, now with a wink of pattern. All-organic, handmade, and old-world at heart, but flipped into clean, modern shapes. From Skopje, Ludus keeps pushing sustainable fashion into its dreamy, future-friendly zone.

And if you thought you knew what ruffles could do, think again. One designer from the Fashion & Textile Design show created a look from “What if a cloud had a breakdown in a linen cupboard?” The result: a monumental, frothy, cream-white explosion that consumed the model from collarbone to kneecaps. It was romantic and absurd and strangely serene, the fashion equivalent of being hugged by a thousand tissue paper angels. And honestly, in this economy? Therapeutic.

Across the week, one thing was clear: while other fashion capitals stress over trends, Ljubljana is riding its own frequency, experimental, local, collaborative, and kind of punk in its serenity and authenticity.

There was no cohesion. No theme. Just pure artistic chaos powering through the city like a glitter tornado. Ljubljana Fashion Week 2025 felt less like an industry event and more like a cult initiation, but a fun cult, with snacks and avant-garde wool demons.

Final thoughts? Ljubljana doesn’t want your trends, it wants your sleep paralysis demons, your textile hallucinations, your couture fever dreams, all stitched into one final scream of a collection. Small city, huge imagination. Ljubljana showed up, and wonderful, weird, conscious fashion never looked better.

@ljfw
Words by Lewis Robert Cameron @lrcfashionstylist
Backstage Photography by Anja Smaka @smaka.chast
HAIR @aska_kajtazovic
MAKEUP @spelaema
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER @melinda_rebrek
PR @i.deapr
Designers Featured
@sarivalenci
@lankrebs
@aemonaofficial
@ludus.agenderlabel
@thingsimisss
@zoja_muhic
@maticveler
@fashiontextile_ntf