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The easiest way to misunderstand fashion in Central Asia is to look at it through the lens of heritage.

For decades, the region has been presented to the outside world through a familiar set of images: silk roads and textiles, nomadic traditions and craft, ornament and folklore. While these references remain an important part of the story, they can obscure a more complex reality. The countries that make up Central Asia have spent the last century negotiating dramatic political and cultural change. Centuries-old traditions, the experience of Soviet modernity and the decades following independence all continue to shape contemporary life. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that questions of memory, inheritance and belonging recur so frequently in the work of the designers emerging from the region today.

The conversations explored here took place during Visa Fashion Week Tashkent Pre-Fall 2026 and bring together three young designers from across the region and its neighbouring geographies: Akbota Kapsalan of Kazakhstan’s KAPSALAN, Elnur Musayev of Azerbaijan’s Yamamaa and the locally-based Asal Sharopova of Uzbekistan’s No.Sugar. Although their practices differ considerably, all three return to remarkably similar questions: How does one engage with cultural memory without becoming confined by it? How can local histories inform contemporary work without being reduced to symbols or clichés? And what does it mean to create fashion in a part of the world that is often defined from the outside before it has had the opportunity to define itself?

Their emergence also comes at a moment when Central Asia is becoming increasingly visible within international cultural conversations. Much of that momentum has recently been driven by Uzbekistan, which has invested heavily in cultural infrastructure and international exchange. In 2025, the inaugural Bukhara Biennial brought together artists, artisans and cultural practitioners from around the world through projects developed in dialogue with local craft traditions. Earlier this year, Uzbekistan’s pavilion at Milan Design Week presented When Apricots Blossom, an exhibition exploring material culture, craftsmanship and environmental narratives through collaborations between international designers and local artisans. Widely praised by critics and visitors alike, the exhibition demonstrated how traditional knowledge can be reinterpreted through contemporary design without being reduced to nostalgia. This year will also see the opening of the National Museum of Uzbekistan designed by Tadao Ando, further signalling the country’s growing investment in contemporary culture.

Fashion forms part of this broader shift. Yet even the notion of a singular ‘Central Asian’ culture remains misleading. The region spans vast distances, multiple languages and distinct historical experiences that are often compressed into a single category. A flight between Almaty and Tashkent takes roughly as long as one between Paris and Rome. Travelling across the region means moving between different landscapes, political realities and cultural traditions. While certain experiences overlap, each country has developed its own relationship to the past and its own vision of the future.

‘People often speak about this part of the world as though it were a single place,’ says Bauyrzhan Shadibekov, founder of Visa Fashion Week, which is the presenting partner in both Tashkent’s and Almaty’s fashion weeks. ‘In reality, every country has its own history, its own cultural codes and its own creative language.’

Before founding her label, Akbota Kapsalan worked in television and later in theatre costume design, experiences that continue to shape the way she thinks about clothing. ‘Theatre taught me the psychology of clothing,’ she says. ‘I learned how to reveal a person’s character through costume.’ Rather than treating garments as objects, she approaches them as narratives. A finalist of the Next Designer Award empowered by Visa, Kapsalan presented Qara Qandyagash, a collection centred on the image of the Black Alder tree, an endangered species surrounded by local mythology and believed to bleed a red resin. Drawing on the structure of the Baiterek, or Tree of Life, she translates roots, trunk and branches into silhouette and construction. The roots stand for ancestors, the trunk for the present generation and the branches for those yet to come. Rather than referencing traditional dress directly, Kapsalan transforms a cultural symbol into a contemporary visual language. ‘For me, heritage is not about repeating what has already been done,’ she says. ‘It is about understanding the values behind it and translating them into a language that feels relevant today.’ The collection reflects a broader fascination with family memory and the transmission of knowledge. Nature for Kapsalan is a living archive carrying scars, stories and accumulated wisdom. This perspective also shapes the way she understands contemporary Kazakhstan. ‘We no longer feel ashamed of where we come from,’ she says. ‘We have made it our superpower.’

If Kapsalan’s work is concerned with ancestry, Asal Sharopova’s work feels more inward. Born in Bukhara and now based in Tashkent, the founder of No.Sugar often returns to the relationship between the two cities. One is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Central Asia, shaped by centuries of trade, migration and cultural exchange. The other is a capital in the midst of transformation, where new institutions, galleries and creative communities continue to emerge. The tension between permanence and change runs throughout her work. Also a finalist of the Next Designer Award empowered by Visa, Sharopova presented Roots, a collection exploring the search for self within an increasingly globalised world. ‘Design helps me understand myself,’ Sharopova says. ‘Every collection becomes a way of processing what I am experiencing and observing around me.’ For Sharopova, clothing is a means of understanding how people carry their histories with them. She speaks less about heritage as an aesthetic category and more about the ways culture is lived and transmitted. ‘Traditions should develop together with society,’ she says. ‘The goal is not to preserve a form. It is to preserve a meaning.’

The distinction feels significant. Much of the international conversation surrounding Uzbekistan remains tied to historical imagery, yet Sharopova’s work suggests a different approach. What interests her is not the preservation of the past, but the possibility of carrying it forward.

Elnur Musayev arrives at similar questions through a different route altogether. The Azerbaijani designer behind Yamamaa was the only participant interviewed here who comes from outside Central Asia proper, yet many of the themes running through his work echoed conversations taking place across the week. His Pre-Fall 2026 collection marks what he describes as a transition from ‘clothing as form’ to ‘clothing as process’. Rather than designing fixed objects, Musayev imagines garments capable of transformation. Through engineered construction and adaptive tailoring, pieces alter their architecture through movement, revealing new silhouettes as the wearer interacts with the fabric. Running beneath the collection is the idea of qurama, a patchwork technique found across parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia in which fragments of fabric are assembled into a new whole. ‘A person is also a kind of qurama,’ Musayev says. ‘We are all made up of different encounters. Different memories. Different stories.’

When asked what people outside their countries most often misunderstand, none of the designers pointed to a specific cultural stereotype. Instead, they spoke about complexity itself. Kapsalan notes that audiences are often surprised to encounter conceptual fashion and avant-garde thinking from Kazakhstan. Sharopova observes that contemporary Uzbekistan is frequently overshadowed by historical narratives. Musayev argues that people often see only the surface of a culture while overlooking the emotional and intellectual layers beneath it. Their frustration is not with heritage itself, but with the expectation that heritage should be the entire story.

The same attitude extends to international audiences. None of the designers appeared particularly interested in making their work more legible for Western consumption. Fashion, for them, is not a translation exercise. What matters is creating work that remains honest to its own context. There is a quiet confidence in this position, one that feels increasingly characteristic of a younger generation of creatives across the region. They do not reject global conversations; they simply no longer feel compelled to enter them on someone else’s terms. For Shadibekov, this is precisely why platforms such as Visa Fashion Week Tashkent matter. ‘The role of fashion week is not to define a regional identity,’ he says. ‘It is to create a platform where different voices can be heard.’

By the end of the week in Tashkent, Musayev’s metaphor felt difficult to forget. Each conversation encountered was marked by difference rather than consensus—different histories, different references, different ways of engaging with the past. Yet they also revealed a shared determination to move beyond inherited narratives without abandoning them altogether. Like a qurama, the stories being written in Tashkent remained distinct even as they formed part of a larger whole.

Photography by Marc Medina (@marcmedina), Kulikov (@kulikov_a9) and Vitaly (@vitalis.vol).