Zalando’s Visionary Award Winner Was the Underdog CPHFW Needed
The Zalando Visionary Award backs emerging designers whose work reaches beyond clothes alone, looking at design alongside innovation and social impact. For 2026, that designer was Galib Gassanoff, founder of Milan-based label INSTITUTION.
After winning the award during Copenhagen Fashion Week in January, Gassanoff received a €50,000 prize alongside mentorship, business development support and Zalando’s backing to bring his next collection to Copenhagen. That collection arrived last week at the National Gallery of Denmark, where INSTITUTION made its Copenhagen Fashion Week debut with SS27, titled YAD.
Its name contains the contradiction at the heart of the collection. In Azerbaijani, yad can mean “foreign” or “strange,” while as a borrowed word it can also signify “memory” or “to remember.” Gassanoff uses that tension to explore the slippery space between belonging somewhere and remembering it from elsewhere.
Before the first model appeared, the collection’s ideas were already underfoot. Carpets from the Caucasus, Anatolia, Northern Iran and Central Asia covered the runway, bringing objects carrying heritage and cultural memory into one of Denmark’s most significant art institutions. For Gassanoff, that setting was deliberate. Asked which detail felt most personal to him, he pointed to the carpets: “The carpet detail, because it’s part of my heritage and culture.” Staging the show inside a museum, itself a place built around preserving history, gave the gesture even more weight.
Models crossed the carpets without shoes, wearing only hand-knitted jorabs, traditional socks associated with domestic life and colder months. Their familiarity stood in sharp contrast to the clothes: elongated, sculptural silhouettes with dramatic proportions, rendered almost entirely in muted black, white and grey. Color was hardly necessary. Construction, texture and an extraordinary attention to detail gave the garments their impact, making the contrast between the intimate setting and imposing silhouettes even more striking.
That tension between belonging and distance is personal for Gassanoff. Georgian of Azerbaijani descent, he grew up outside Tbilisi surrounded by intersecting languages, crafts and traditions before moving to Milan at 18. He founded INSTITUTION in 2024 not simply as a fashion label, but as a social-artistic organisation where cultural reflection, community collaboration and design could sit alongside one another.
“When it’s part of your identity, I think that is the most natural thing to express,” Gassanoff said of bringing his heritage onto the Copenhagen Fashion Week stage. “This time, I wanted to showcase the memories I have, as well as my heritage and culture, which probably not many people have heard about or seen.”
YAD makes that intention tangible through the people involved in creating it. The jorabs were hand-knitted by Azerbaijani artisans in Georgia’s Kvemo Kartli region using wool from their own livestock. The same community collaborated with Gassanoff on three sculptural pieces made from cotton cord, shifting techniques passed down through generations into exaggerated contemporary forms. Elsewhere, silk, wool, cashmere, mohair and stainless steel were layered and draped to reshape the body, moving constantly between softness and structure.
That sculptural quality also drew from details Gassanoff remembers from home, with draping that echoed scarves worn around the neck by women in his community. Rather than depending on color or decoration for impact, the collection let volume, texture and the physical behavior of its materials carry the drama.
Some of its most striking pieces incorporated tetri, Georgia’s fractional currency. Attached to silk, the coins disrupted the fabric’s fluidity until it resembled a kind of chain mail, catching and reflecting the light across the room while adding another layer of sound to the music. Gassanoff connects the coins to ideas of freedom from repression, giving the material a significance beyond appearance alone.
This is where INSTITUTION’s approach to heritage feels most convincing. Gassanoff is not interested in preserving tradition untouched or reducing it to reference. He lets it evolve. Much of YAD was made from natural-fibre deadstock sourced from Italian manufacturers, meaning some pieces exist only in the quantities the material allows. That same restraint carried through to the beauty: low, undone buns and deliberately unpolished styling kept the attention on the clothes. “It’s not about glam or fashion itself,” Gassanoff said. “It’s about craftsmanship. It’s about real clothing made in a certain way.”
For INSTITUTION, YAD remains rooted in something intimate: particular communities, objects, memories and the people keeping the techniques behind them alive. Within the typically polished landscape of Copenhagen Fashion Week, the show felt like a beautiful underdog story. It stood out through its singular take on heritage and, more importantly, through the memorable and deeply personal way Gassanoff chose to bring that heritage to the runway.
