TAMRA Brings Fashion and Performance Together at MBFW Tbilisi

At Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi, Georgian designer Tamuna Karumidze presented her latest TAMRA collection through a theatrical performance. Instead of a conventional runway presentation, the designer assembled a cast of actors, comedians and creative personalities to explore desire, intimacy and rejection through clothing and performance. At the center of the runway stood a bed, around which the story unfolded.

Psychologist Giorgi Khatiashvili was at the center of the performance, inviting different participants to join him in bed as the scenes progressed.

ph: Gaby Acosta	ph: Gaby Acosta

The first encounters drew on humor. Later, performers appeared with scratches on their bodies and wounds on their heads. By the final scene, Khatiashvili’s character had stabbed another participant. The clothes were presented within the action, with the cast performing their roles rather than following the usual runway format.

Final Scene by Gaby Acosta

Georgian fashion designer Giorgi Keburia, whose work has earned international recognition, also stepped onto the runway, his head marked with scratches. His unexpected appearance drew an enthusiastic response from the front row, which, for a moment, felt more like a theater audience as applause broke out.

Karumidze came to fashion through filmmaking, a background that continues to shape her work.

“Clothes don't simply appear in my mind. The idea always comes from somewhere. I'm constantly telling a story, almost as if I'm making a film. Even when I'm working on clothes, I'm still in cinema,” she says.

Her interest in design developed while she was making a film about skateboarders. She began creating clothes for the people appearing in the project, experimenting with garments in front of the camera and observing how they moved on the body.

At the time, clothing design was something she pursued outside her filmmaking work. She made her own patterns and taught herself construction techniques, determined to understand the practical challenges of producing her ideas. When others told her that certain designs could not be made, she continued experimenting until she found ways to execute them.

In 2017, Sofia Tchkonia, founder of Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Tbilisi, discovered Karumidze’s work and invited her to present a collection. The invitation marked her first appearance at the event. Around the same period, she established the name TAMRA for her label.

Since then, Karumidze has drawn on cinema, music, street culture and contemporary social issues in developing her collections. Her interest in performance also gives her room to work with people outside the traditional modeling world, as she did in her latest show.

“Fashion has shifted more toward business than art, which is unfortunate. I always try to bring it back to art. That's why there's so much freedom in my brand,” she says.

At MBFW Tbilisi, that freedom took the form of an ensemble performance built around a single bed. Khatiashvili remained its central figure as the other characters came and went, their encounters moving between humor, intimacy and aggression. The presentation ended not with a traditional runway finale, but with the violent conclusion of the scene.

Cover photography: Oto Kirakozashvili

Photos from MBFW Tbilisi SS27: Gaby Acosta