When sculpture meets silhouette and a runway meets a repurposed urban space, something shifts—not just in style, but in culture. This spring, two of Romania’s most influential creative platforms, Romanian Design Week (RDW) and Mercedes-Benz Bucharest Fashion Week (MBBFW), have officially joined forces. The result? A cross-disciplinary collision with reverberations far beyond the catwalk.
Bucharest, the Cultural Collider
Forget the old formula. Bucharest is rewriting the script—designing, draping, drafting its way toward a hybrid cultural identity. And in 2025, two major players are behind the momentum: RDW, the country’s leading design festival, and MBBFW, Romania’s most prominent international fashion event.
The backdrop? RDW’s 2025 theme, “Design Tomorrow Today,” is a directive that speaks directly to MBBFW’s shared pillars of education, sustainability, and artistic innovation. This is less of a “what’s trending” event and more of a vision-setting summit for Romania’s creative industries.
RDW: The Cultural Catalyst of the Capital
Romanian Design Week has, for over a decade, served as Bucharest’s unofficial creative compass. But it’s not just a showcase—it’s a systems builder, a collaboration incubator, and increasingly, a pan-European platform for dialogue and cultural production.
RDW 2025 marks a watershed: for the first time, the entire program is curated exclusively through partnerships—from embassies and cultural institutes to design studios, architectural collectives, and yes, even fashion houses. These are not siloed showrooms. They’re living intersections—open spaces where a Ukrainian tailoring ethos can speak to a Romanian material experiment, or where a Moldovan studio can share a framework for textile upcycling with a Dutch graphic collective.
This year, fashion doesn’t simply appear in RDW’s programming—it’s structurally embedded, thanks in part to its first-ever formal partnership with MBBFW.
“When creativity crosses disciplines, it doesn’t just build bridges—it builds new worlds. This is how culture grows: together, across ideas, languages, and borders.”
MBBFW: Turning “Made in Romania” into a Global Signature
While RDW stretches across the design spectrum, Mercedes-Benz Bucharest Fashion Week remains laser-focused on its founding mission: elevating Romanian fashion and exporting it to the world.
Launched as Romania’s first international fashion event, MBBFW is built on an elegant scaffolding—an intersection of industry, artistry, and commerce. The second edition, held from March 27–30, 2025, was more than a series of runway shows. It transformed the capital into a vibrant cultural stage, complete with fashion presentations, artist talks, and sustainability workshops.
With 19 designers from Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, and Italy, this year’s edition radiated regional richness. But beneath the surface of style was something deeper: a commitment to fashion as education, fashion as dialogue, fashion as action.
When Currents Collide: The RDW × MBBFW Debut
A special showcase is set to mark the first collaboration between RDW and MBBFW—possibly not a runway, but an immersive fashion installation where garments exist as spatial statements. Here’s how key designers might show up:
- Carmen Secăreanu
Avant-garde cuts, strict palettes, and rich textures meet sculptural restraint. Expect dramatic contrasts—minimalism laced with opulence. - Alexandra Șipa
Upcycled lace and wirework become wearable art. Her vision honors Romanian heritage with a sustainable, edgy twist. - ALMAZ
Global elegance rooted in Bucharest. Think sleek silhouettes with urban confidence—made for cosmopolitan spaces. - Vestiaire d’un Oiseau Libre
Fluid forms in all-white palettes symbolize freedom and purity. Likely soft, minimal, and conceptual. - Murmur
Sensuality with structure. Corsetry and body-conscious shapes may appear as intimate installations or kinetic displays. - Kseniaschnaider & Litkovska
From Kyiv with vision—expect reconstructed denim, genderless tailoring, and emotional layering that speaks to resilience.
Together, these voices hint at a new era: one where fashion isn’t just worn—it’s experienced.
Redefining Romania’s Creative Identity
At its heart, the RDW × MBBFW collaboration is more than a meeting of design and fashion—it’s a celebration of people, stories, and shared visions. In Bucharest, a city where tradition hums beneath every bold idea, this partnership feels like a natural evolution. It shows what happens when creativity isn’t confined to disciplines but allowed to flow freely between them. Together, these events aren’t just shaping a cultural moment—they’re creating a space where local voices speak louder, new conversations begin, and the future feels just a little more connected, a little more possible.
