How Ukrainian designers are redefining menswear through adaptive inclusivity

On the runways of Ukrainian Fashion Week, where aesthetics always carry political weight, designers Andriy Moskin and Andreas Bilous of label Andreas Moskin have elevated their craft into a form of social healing. Over the last two seasons, we have witnessed a poignant evolution: war veterans donning prosthetic limbs showing alongside professional models, walking the catwalk with a presence that transcends style. This is fashion’s answer to survival and dignity, rendered in fine tailoring and adaptive practicality.

Back in September 2024, as Ukraine’s fashion week finally returned to Kyiv for the first time since the full-scale invasion, Moskin and Bilous staged a show that the world could not ignore. Among their looks, characterised by bohemian flourishes, folk-inspired shirts, asymmetric embroidery, and tasselled linen recalling the nation’s poetic cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, ran veterans of war, prosthetics and all. Bilous told AP News: “We wanted to show that Ukrainian fashion is adapting to society, for people with amputations who survived the war… without limbs, they can be stylish. They need to be loved, respected, and perceived as an integral part of society.”

For the Fall 2025 season, Andreas Moskin’s "Executed Renaissance" collection continued the theme of adaptation, now through structural ingenuity. The collection featured elongated tweed jackets and deconstructed suits in crimson and khaki tones: garments that evoke the cultural rupture of mid-20th-century losses and the hopeful emergence of independence. Yet the innovation lay in the technical: removable sleeves with invisible zippers and inner-seam closures on trousers, designed to accommodate prosthetic limbs without compromising form or elegance.

As a critic watching these performances, one can’t help but consider the parallels between tailoring and healing. A suit was once the uniform of civility; now it is also the limb’s support, the bridge between fragility and poise.

Looking ahead, Ukrainian Fashion Week’s next iteration in September 2025 will once again feature Moskin and Bilous working closely with veterans in SS 26 preparations. Although specifics of the collection remain under wraps, sources indicate that rehearsal sessions are already underway, a reminder that this is not artifice, but a deeply human endeavour: fashion as repair, inclusion as design.

Adaptive design is fast becoming one of Ukraine’s most poignant fashion exports, practical, politicised and tenderly crafted. Designers Moskin and Bilous are guiding this transformation through garments that do more than cover: they humanise, and empower.

What this means for fashion’s broader discourse

The fragile beauty of adaptive menswear in Kyiv signals a departure from fashion’s preoccupation with novelty for novelty’s sake. Here, innovation is moral as well as aesthetic, and functionality is sewn into every silhouette.