Estonia’s Wildly Promising Fashion–Art Axis

Writing about the fashion scene in one of Europe’s smallest countries is always a bit masochistic. Tallinn is not exactly Paris. Or even Copenhagen. The fashion business here is more of an endangered species: bigger manufacturers quietly shut down every time the economy wobbles, small brands pick up the slack until they run out of energy, funds, or both. So no — I’m not going to pretend we’re a glitzy “fashion destination”. However, we are a destination worth taking a look at, and for reasons entirely different from the established, well-known spots on the map.

What we do have, in absolutely indecent amounts, is talent. Raw, sharp, sometimes painfully underused talent. Talent that either slips away to big houses in Paris, London, Berlin, climbs the ladder there until it headbutts a glass ceiling — or stays here and mutates into something less recognisable as “fashion” and more like… art. And that’s where things get interesting.

Photo credits: Kärt Hammer by Roman Sten Tõnissoo

From “applied” to unapologetic

There’s a quote that has lived rent-free in my head for at least a decade: “It’s craft until a man says it’s art.” Forgive me for not remembering the smart brain that produced it.

If you look at Estonian art history, that line stings. For years, women working with textiles, jewellery, leather, ceramics — the so-called “applied arts” — were kept in a kind of conceptual waiting room. Even when their work was razor-sharp in both idea and execution, it was still filed under “craft”, not “art”. Decorative. Supplemental. Nice.

That has been shifting. Slowly at first, and yes, often helped along by male authors and institutions finally declaring: “Actually, this is art.

Now we’re watching a new generation of (mostly) female artists — Kris Lemsalu, Edith Karlson and others — who grew up on that underappreciated legacy and have zero interest in apologising for their medium. They’re using legacy techniques with full conceptual swagger — and the international art world has finally begun paying attention. It has even rediscovered giants of previous generations like Anu Põder.

Photo credits: Laivi Suurväli by Roman Sten Tõnissoo

Fashion skills, art-world stage

I keep a fairly shameless eye on both: the art world and the (alternative) fashion scene along with the students at the Estonian Academy of Arts. And there has been a clear shift brewing: fashion skills have been sliding, quite elegantly, into the art world. Not “fashion as illustration of art”, but fashion as a fully fledged language alongside painting, sculpture and performance.

Artists trained in fashion — like Laivi Suurväli (I Λ I V I) — have been placing garments and textiles in galleries the way others place sculptures. Her exhibition Mapping Paradise (2024) treated clothing as cartography of the body: not merch on a rack, but spatial, sculptural thinking in cloth. Seams became topographies; silhouettes read like landscapes. And her recent show Fragmented Unity (2024) pushed this even further — it was a quiet, restless meditation on ambiguity and selfhood, where garments behaved like emotional states: frayed, layered, yearning, deliberately unresolved.

Photo credits: Laivi Suurväli by Roman Sten Tõnissoo

Then there are artists like Kärt Hammer, whose aesthetic universe runs on a tight current between abstract painting, installation and fashion. She paints large, minimal, highly controlled canvases — black, white, colourful phases like mood swings rendered as architecture — and then flips into theatre and film as a costume designer and stylist. The sensibility is the same: building a world through cut, proportion, texture. Her installation Must (2023), a stripped-back, myth-charged exploration, treated chaos as both energy source and emotional architecture, turning the gallery into a threshold between destruction and regeneration. Her exhibition Dirty White (2024) continued that line of inquiry — not “fashion” in any traditional sense, but deeply concerned with bodies, purity fantasies and visual codes. You could feel her orchestrating the space: everything slightly stagey, like a set for a play that hadn’t yet been written. And there were fashion objects there too, just enough to draw in the crowd. Her collaborative installation Walls (2025) with singer-songwriter Anna Kaneelina demonstrated the same sensibilities: fashion as a justified component of an emotional, conceptual whole that put mirrors in front of the audience and invited them to set themselves free.

Photo credits: Kärt Hammer by Roman Sten Tõnissoo

And then there are the projects that shamelessly blow up the scale of fashion itself. Ron Verlin’s debut solo show that which I was in life, I am in death (2025) dragged fashion into the gallery as full-blown existential scenography: garments as decaying relics, a liturgy of burnout, a Dante-coded descent before any hope of redemption.

Photo credits: Ron Verlin by Anna Mari Liivrand

On the other end of the spectrum, Karl Joonas Alamaa and Lisete Sivard’s performance and later film project Mania Grandiosa turned a five-day runway from Tallinn to the village of Paris (yes, an actual place in Estonia) into a monument of small-country bravado and quiet insecurity — a love letter to the creatives who walked, stumbled and sometimes sprinted their way to their own “Paris”. Together they framed Estonian fashion as something far beyond seasonal trends: a way to think about faith, myth, ambition and exhaustion in a world that’s technologically overclocked and spiritually running on fumes. This is where Estonian “fashion” quietly stepped sideways and became something else: not product, but atmosphere. Not a collection of clothes, but of thought. 

Photo credits: Mania Grandiosa by Johann Kööp

The latest bite of the phenomena  

The most delicious current example of this art–fashion–design tangle is Neanderthal’s Beauty Parlor, a speculative beauty installation by Madlen Hirtentreu and Darja Popolitova at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design. 
 
Imagine a clinic–shrine hybrid: part beauty salon, part medical theatre, part sci-fi ruin. A mud-stained, slightly obscene dentist’s chair. Surgical lights humming overhead. Silver-slick tables displaying invented tools: nail suckers, butt shakers, gaze amplifiers, body activators — half joke, half threat. Fossils, stones, silver, lab-grown crystals, industrial metal. It’s posthuman beauty culture filtered through Neanderthal cosplay and speculative design. 

Photo credits: Darja Popolitova and Madlen Hirtentreu
 

The work pokes at how “self-care” is sold as empowerment while actually disciplining the body into ever tighter norms. It reminds us that both Neanderthals and modern humans mark belonging on the skin — only where they used ochre and claw pendants, we have injectables, ring lights and algorithms training our faces for optimal engagement. For me, this is absolutely fashion territory — everything is about surfaces, rituals, accessories and the choreography of being looked at. 
 
Popolitova comes from jewellery; Hirtentreu moves between sculpture, installation and metalwork. Together they’ve built something closer to a total look, a “show” that just happens to take place in a museum instead of a warehouse or club. This is where Estonian fashion knowledge — material sensitivity, body awareness, styling instincts — reappears as cutting-edge contemporary art. 

Fashion kids ghosting the fashion industry 

This world isn’t running out of new blood. More and more fashion students look at the actual fashion industry and go, “Yeah… no thanks.” They know exactly what it means to become a tiny cog in a very large machine: burnout, compromised creativity, unpaid internships dressed up as opportunity. Instead, they’re using their pattern-cutting, textile and styling skills to create figurative art, installations or scenography rather than classical collections. 

Photo credits: SORCERER by Tom Brennecke

It’s not a failure of ambition — it’s self-preservation. An escape hatch. They’d rather build one unforgettable performance, one total environment, than churn out endless market-friendly separates. In a way, Estonia is the perfect size for that. You can’t really disappear into a massive industry here, so you might as well go weird and interdisciplinary. 

The alternative fashion week that shook 

And interdisciplinary it is — and this trend is growing on fertile soil. Officially, Tallinn has its little, and mostly underwhelming, fashion weeks twice a year. Unofficially, a special week emerged this August to rival them big time. 

Photo credits: SORCERER by Tom Brennecke

There was a mini-marathon of high-level performance-shows: Autolysis by SORCERER, Eden.EXE by Mari Lemet and collaborators, and Finiśage by Ron Verlin, Maria Roosiaas, Jaagup Kaiv, Kristiina Tali and Hanna Tiina Pekk. Forget standard runway shows where models march down a strip of light in borrowed shoes. These were full-on hybrid works: modern dance, performance art, especially compiled or produced music, strong scenography — and yes, fashion, but as part of a bigger, carefully thought-through universe. The performers weren’t just human hangers; they were co-authors of the atmosphere. The clothing, set and bodies were treated as one organism, not separate departments. 

It was exactly the level I’d have been happy to show anywhere in the world. And yet — of course — most of it ran on enthusiasm, a couple of sponsors, supportive friends and overworked organisers. No real safety net, no strong structural support. 

Photo credits: Finnisage by Hanna-Liisa Jüriöö

Talented hobbyists or future canon? 

This is the paradox: on the one hand, Estonia’s new fashion–art axis is wildly promising. Designers think like artists, artists think like stylists, choreographers think like creative directors. The shows and exhibitions are smart, ambitious and visually fearless.  

On the other hand, without proper backing they risk remaining exactly what they are now: “very, very talented hobby designers” who squeeze genius in between day jobs, or “opportunity refugees” who eventually leave because there is simply no structure here to support them past a certain point.  

Photo credits: Finnisage by Hanna-Liisa Jüriöö

The state and business still mostly sleep through this. There’s a lot of warm talk about innovation and the creative economy, much less actual money and long-term thinking. The potential is treated as a cute side-project, not a serious cultural or economic asset. But this is how scenes die or move elsewhere. If you don’t help build the scaffolding, the house gets built in another country. 

Why care about Estonian fashion-art? 

So why am I telling you all this? Because Estonia’s “new art-fashion” isn’t trying to be a mini version of anywhere else. It’s a scene where a jewellery artist and a sculptor build a speculative beauty lab that feels like a cross between a spa, a clinic and a sci-fi temple. A painter uses her costume-designer brain to turn galleries into minimal, myth-soaked sanctuaries instead of just hanging canvases on white walls. A fashion designer shows her work as an installation of garments and textiles, turning the runway into something closer to an altar or a landscape than a shop window. And alternative “fashion weeks” look more like experimental theatre festivals, with models performing, sweating, bleeding, collapsing, dancing — not just posing. 

It’s small, fragile and deeply DIY — but it’s also where some of the most interesting conversations between fashion, art, performance and speculative design are happening right now. 

Estonia will probably never compete with the big fashion destinations on volume or budgets. But as a concept lab, as a place where fashion is allowed to bleed into everything else — it’s already punching way above its weight. The talent and the voice are there. 

The question, as always, is whether that voice will keep echoing within our small scene, or manage to break through into a broader conversation. 

Text by Ester Kannelmäe, Fashion and Communication Expert,
Lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts