MUNICH FASHION AWARD WINNER 1st EDITION 2025

Find the MFA finalists in the categories „Contemporary Sustainable Fashion“ and „Contemporary Sustainable Accessories“ here! After an intensive review of more than 170 submissions from all over Europe, the renowend expert jury of the MUNICH FASHION AWARD has selected the designers whose forward-looking concepts were equally convincing in terms of sustainability and aesthetics. Brands from Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine and the United Kingdom submitted entries.

PLNGNS — 2nd Place Winner at Munich Fashion Award 2025

We’re proud to share that PLNGNS won 2nd place at the Munich Fashion Award 2025, a prestigious competition showcasing the most innovative emerging designers in Europe. Our work with upcycled materials and circular fashion was recognized for its bold vision and sustainable approach.

PLNGNS presents the IDENTITY Collection in a New Format on Ukrainian Fashion Week

Following at Berlin Fashion Week 2025, Ukrainian streetwear brand PLNGNS (Palingenesy) presented its latest collection IDENTITY during Ukrainian Fashion Week in an installation format, reaffirming the brand’s commitment to upcycling, experimental design, and sustainable development.

The IDENTITY collection reflects PLNGNS’ mission to reshape the fashion industry by transforming waste into value. Creative Director Mitya Hontarenko and Head Designer Iryna Ambrosova note:
“We aim to design future-proof garments — bold, thoughtful, and circular by default.”

Concept

The presentation was conceived as a “gallery within a gallery” — a space where fashion, ecology, and artistic reflection converge. Garments were exhibited statically as artefacts of the future, highlighting the brand’s signature material — used sneakers, turned into functional textiles. The raw aesthetics of recycled elements were intentionally preserved, and custom prints transferred sneaker textures onto fabric, forming organic, unrefined patterns.

Curation & Support

The installation was curated by Margarita Shekel, with spatial design by Tetyana Serezitinova. It was made possible with the support of RECONOMY, an initiative by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), implemented by HELVETAS Swiss Intercooperation, as part of the project “Circular Business Models and Resource Efficiency for Competitiveness and Growth in the Textile and Apparel Sector in the Eastern Partnership Countries.”

Vibram x PLNGNS

On February 7, our brand presented our debut streetwear collection at Berlin Fashion Week 
Apart, we would like to talk about our collaboration, which was also shown at our debut fashion show.
Over several years of operating the PLNGNS brand, recycling old shoes and turning them into material for further use, they accumulated quite a lot of unusable, damaged soles that are not suitable for reuse in their original form. 
Collaboration with VibramConnect , where we crushed the old sole into granules, and then VibramConnect in its research center in Milan, created a new sole from the ground-up old sole. Moreover, when pouring the sole, we introduced into it branding details taken from the old shoes that we recycle. There, we received our new sole from Vibram made from ground-up old unusable soles, as well as various parts of old shoes.

ITS Footwear Award powered by Fondazione Ferragamo

Dmytro Hontarenko, the designer of the Ukrainian footwear brand PALINGENESY, has won the International Talents Support (ITS) contest in the Footwear Award nomination supported by Fondazione Ferragamo. The award ceremony took place at the ITS Arcademy Museum of Contemporary Art in Trieste, Italy. The jury said that Hontarenko had “combined research, craftsmanship and attention to sustainability in his project, embracing the challenges of our present time not as obstacles but as incentives, with the spirit of the true creative, like Salvatore Ferragamo”.

Vegan Fashion Week

The negative impact of the fashion industry on the environment is, unfortunately, unpleasantly impressive. It is possible to overcome the current crisis by starting cooperation in the matter of preserving the Earth’s ecology as soon as possible. Vegan Fashion Week is an event that promotes the exchange of experience in this direction. This year, over three days in October, this event turned Los Angeles into the capital of sustainable fashion. Ukrainian Fashion Week became one of VFW’s partners. As part of the “Support Ukrainian Fashion” initiative, UFW presented the images of 11 Ukrainian designers. Among them was the conceptual shoe brand Palingenesy. All participating brands are cruelty-free and sustainable.

Ukrainian Fashion Week х Epson Digital Fashion Lab

During the Ukrainian Fashion Week FW22-23, twenty graduates of the Epson Digital Fashion Lab educational project presented collections of their own brands. A new era of young Ukrainian designers is rising to the top of the increasingly saturated fashion industry. Each of the 20 participants of Digital Fashion Lab, a joint project of Epson and Ukrainian Fashion Week, presented their original printed collections.

PLNGNS x RIOT DIVISION

Bring an old pair of sneakers and participate in the development of unique recycled shoes for RIOTDIVISION. In August 2021, we installed a box to collect used shoes in the RIOTDIVISION concept store, which were disassembled and will be used in our future works, and as part of the campaign we created two pairs of sneakers that were used by RIOTDIVISION. The finale of this collab is a raffle of sneakers among the audience of the brand, but unfortunately, due to the full-scale invasion of the russian federation on February 24, 2022, this did not happen, so we hope that the collab will be finalized in the future.