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On a leafy street in Yunusabad, just north of central Tashkent, behind a wrought-iron gate and a garden planted with roses, irises and young fruit trees, stands a pale yellow villa that once belonged to a prosecutor in the municipal justice system of Uzbekistan’s capital. Today it houses the studio of designer Jenia Kim, whose eponymous label — founded in 2014, while she was living in Moscow — has become one of the defining voices in contemporary Central Asian fashion. While many designers from the region have built careers by leaving, Jenia has spent the last four years doing the opposite: building a company, a studio and, increasingly, a creative community in the city where she was born.

Upon approach, the house reveals itself slowly, unexpectedly placed for its setting. A gravel path winds through the garden. At its centre is a fountain, empty of water and instead piled with kurpacha — the same thickly-patterned cotton mattresses found across Uzbek homes, dragged outside and draped over the stone edge as seating. To the right, under a columned portico, sits a tapchan laid for tea: a raised wooden platform, low to the ground and open on all sides, the traditional gathering spot in Uzbek courtyards and teahouses. Only once visitors round the path do they climb the short flight of stone steps to the entrance. Inside, a double-height hall opens beneath an ornate balcony, flooded with afternoon light. The plasterwork lining the walls and ceiling, deep coving, framed archways, a relief so dense it reads almost like lace from below, is original to the prosecutor who built the house. Jenia has changed almost nothing about it, hanging her own photographs and artwork directly into the original panelling. At its centre sits a monumental carved wooden see-saw. Along the walls are antique Uzbek chests, sandiq, that Jenia has collected over years of travelling across the country, each one returning home with her from a different village, market or roadside discovery. Suspended overhead hangs a chandelier she designed from discarded street lamps, so heavy that installing it took real effort to get it right. ‘I was scared it would fall one day,’ she says, laughing about it now, though at the time the worry was real. The first room on the left is her office. It is unexpectedly modest: a desk, a lamp she designed herself, a stack of sketches, a board pinned with fabric swatches and handwritten notes.

Hanging from a rail against one of the antique chests are the pieces from the Spring Summer 2026 collection Quroq, which Jenia presented in Almaty, in neighbouring Kazakhstan, eight months earlier — the latest chapter in an idea she has returned to season after season since 2020, when quroq first appeared in her work as a technique. Up close, what looks from across the room like a single printed fabric turns out to be remnants stitched together, no two quite matching, the seams left visible rather than hidden. Jenia explains that quroq textiles are traditionally made collectively, passed between women in a household as a way of using nothing new and wasting nothing old; an early exploration of the technique gave her a dress built from the same diamond-patched canvases young women once spent months hand-making as part of their dowries. I don’t recognise the fabrics yet — that will come later in the week, on a market stall piled with the same faded florals and geometric prints, cut for kurpacha rather than dresses and jackets. Nor do I register the sequins scattered through some pieces, the same dense, unapologetic shine on garments worn by aunties I’ll later see on my travels to Samarkand, the ancient Silk Road capital. For now, everything just looks beautiful and unfamiliar in a way I can’t yet place — which is close to the effect Jenia is after: taking Uzbek textiles she grew up around and putting them in front of people who have never had reason to look at them twice.

That approach extends beyond the clothes themselves. Photographer Hassan Kurbanbaev has known Jenia for almost a decade and worked with her repeatedly on J.Kim projects. ‘For us, it has never been simply a commercial shoot, or a relationship between a client and a photographer,’ he tells me. ‘Jenia, like me, is interested in stories that aren’t necessarily tied to commerce. I think there is always a message in them.’ Before any shooting, he says, they discuss each idea in detail, drawing, developing characters and thinking through how the story might unfold. ‘That is where the real creative process happens. Jenia gives you freedom, but at the same time she remains involved at every stage of the project.’

Over the course of the few days I spend in Tashkent, I realise the J.Kim House resists simple definitions. It is a studio, certainly, but it is also where Jenia’s daughter wanders in and out of conversations, where friends stop by and where work unfolds at a pace that seems entirely its own. At one point, Russian pop music suddenly floods the atrium, the volume cranked up so loud it seems to bounce off the high ceiling and come back twice as loud. Jenia laughs, scoops up her daughter and, still perched on towering wooden platforms, dances across the hall, spinning her in circles with an ease that makes you forget how impossibly high they are. A few people glance over and smile, unsurprised, as if this happens most days. When the song ends, she sets her daughter back down, catches her breath, and the conversation continues as though nothing unusual has happened.

I first met Jenia several months earlier in Paris. There, I mistook her reserve for distance. She answered questions carefully, allowing silence to settle before speaking again, and seemed entirely uninterested in the rituals of self-presentation that fashion so often rewards. She never appeared uncomfortable, only unconcerned with filling the space. In an industry where confidence is often performed through immediacy, her restraint felt almost unreadable. It is only in Tashkent that I begin to understand those pauses differently.

Born to a Koryo-saram family, descendants of the hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans forcibly deported from the Soviet Far East to Central Asia under Stalin in 1937, Jenia Kim was 11 when her family moved to Moscow from Tashkent. It was there, she tells me, that she first became conscious of her appearance as something that determined how the world might read her before she had spoken a single word. ‘I wanted to be Russkaya,’ she says, using the Russian word that refers not simply to a citizen of Russia but to someone who is ethnically Russian — and therefore white. She is describing a longing to belong so completely that people would stop noticing her face at all, that she could move through the city without the small, constant work of accounting for herself.

When she speaks about those years there is very little self-pity in her voice. If anything, she sounds curious, more interested in how the feelings came to exist than in dwelling on them. As a teenager she was convinced that no one would ever marry her because she was Korean. She laughs softly when she says it now — not because it is funny, but because she can hardly believe she once accepted the thought so unquestioningly. At the time, it didn’t feel irrational. She had absorbed an entire hierarchy of beauty and belonging without ever being taught it directly, and eventually mistook it for her own opinion.

In her early twenties she moved almost exclusively within Asian communities in Moscow: Koreans, Buryats, Kazakhs, Kalmyks. For the first time, she had something like community, people who didn’t require explanation, who simply understood. But that same belonging came with a cost she hadn’t expected. Among them, she was visible in a new way, not as herself, but as one of a group, read collectively rather than individually. Later, as she began building a career in fashion, the rooms she needed to be in changed. Moscow’s creative and fashion circles at the time were, and still are, overwhelmingly white, and succeeding meant being part of them. It was there that a different kind of comfort emerged: being the only Asian person in the room. Being the only one meant she could simply become Jenia. There was no group to be read as part of, no collective to disappear into, just her.

One memory has stayed with her, from more than ten years ago now, when she was still in her early twenties. Friends from Kazakhstan had come to visit Moscow and together they went to one of the city’s fashionable nightclubs. As they approached the entrance, she instinctively walked several steps ahead, hoping people would assume she had arrived alone. ‘I didn’t want people to think I was with them,’ she tells me matter-of-factly. She doesn’t lower her voice or attempt to soften the confession. Time has placed enough distance between herself and the young woman she once was that she can examine the memory almost analytically, less interested in defending her behaviour than in understanding the system of beliefs that made it feel completely reasonable. ‘It wasn’t about them,’ she says. ‘It was about me.’

That distinction matters to her now. The memory no longer embarrasses her because of what she did, it fascinates her because of what it revealed. Somewhere, without consciously noticing it, she had come to believe that belonging depended on becoming less visible, that resemblance to the majority offered safety, that standing beside other people who looked like her somehow made her more conspicuous than standing alone. She speaks about this younger version of herself neither with contempt nor forgiveness — approaching her, instead, almost as she might approach a garment she had designed years earlier: taking it apart, examining its construction, asking what hidden structure held it together. That moment outside the nightclub was not the cause of her identity crisis, but it was what made her recognise that there was something to investigate.

The investigation would occupy her for years. She began reading about the history of the Koryo-saram community, tracing the forced deportations that had brought Soviet Koreans to Central Asia, then moved into Korean history, Uzbek history and the ways identity survives through ritual, language, family stories and objects carried from one generation to the next. Long before identity became a subject in her collections, it had become the subject of her own research. Looking back now, she sees her early collections, designed between 2013 and 2018, less as expressions of identity than as documents of an ongoing inquiry. She wasn’t trying to tell the world who she was. She was trying to find out.

By the time she reached her early thirties, the urgency of that investigation had begun to fade. The questions that had once driven her work no longer demanded answers in the same way. ‘I healed,’ she tells me simply. There is no triumph in her voice, nor any desire to present healing as a final destination. The insecurities that had once fuelled her ambition gradually loosened their hold. ‘Fear was a huge motivation for me,’ she says. ‘Now it isn’t.’

The change left an unexpected space. For years, understanding herself had been enough to propel her forward. Once that work was no longer at the centre of her practice, another question had to emerge. If she was no longer building only for herself, what was she building for? Jenia often speaks about the industry with an unusual degree of scepticism, particularly its dependence on aspiration and insecurity. ‘I think it’s often about safety,’ she tells me. ‘People buy things because they want to feel safe.’ She believes many of our purchases have surprisingly little to do with aesthetics. Instead, they are attempts to quiet an internal uncertainty. We buy the expensive bag because it makes us feel more confident walking into a hotel lobby. We wear the right clothes to a party because they promise a sense of belonging. Fashion, she suggests, has become remarkably effective at selling reassurance.

‘I want people to respond from their inner self,’ she says. ‘Not from complexes shaped by the outside world.’

It is an observation that feels inseparable from her own story. As a teenager, she had wanted to become invisible inside the majority. As a young designer, she used clothing to understand the fears she had inherited. Having arrived on the other side of that process, she found herself asking a different question: what if a brand did not speak to people’s insecurities, but to their convictions?

She knows it is an idealistic ambition, and a commercially difficult one. Brands built around status, desire and aspiration often grow faster than those asking consumers to buy less impulsively and more consciously. ‘Maybe that’s why we’re developing so slowly,’ she says with a smile. For her, growth has never been the only measure of success. The question has gradually become less about how many people buy into the brand than about what kind of values the brand helps sustain — and, increasingly, about what the brand can do for the place it comes from.

Today, Jenia estimates that design occupies only a fraction of her working life. Much of her time is spent overseeing production, managing finances, mentoring employees, solving logistical problems and building a company capable of existing beyond her own creative output. She speaks about these responsibilities without nostalgia for the years when all she had to think about were collections. The work has simply changed. ‘I don’t want everything to depend on me,’ she says. ‘The goal is to build something that can continue without me.’

I see what she means one afternoon over lunch, when Blake — the editor-in-chief of A Magazine, who has travelled with me to Uzbekistan and is meeting Jenia for the first time — joins us at the house. Jenia orders plov from a nearby café: two traditional portions for us, a vegetarian one for Blake, and a big plate of pickles to share. We eat on the tapchan in the courtyard while the studio carries on around us. Halfway through the meal, three customers wander into the garden. Blake and I pause. ‘Do you need to go?’ we ask. Jenia looks over briefly before shaking her head. ‘It’s better if I don’t. My team is much better with clients than I am.’ One of her colleagues walks over to greet them while Jenia tears off another piece of bread and carries on eating, seemingly relieved not to have to interrupt the conversation.

Listening to her, it becomes clear that this impulse — to build something that doesn’t need her in every room — is not managerial so much as philosophical. The instinct that once compelled her to examine her inner world has turned outwards. She no longer speaks primarily about self-expression, but about creating structures that make it possible for others to stay, to work and to imagine a future where they already are.

The moment she recognised that shift had nothing to do with fashion. In February 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, anti-war demonstrations broke out across the country. Within hours of the invasion being announced, riot police were moving through the crowds, and by the end of that first day more than 1600 people had been detained across Russia. Some of the harshest crackdowns were documented at Pushkin Square, verified later by Human Rights Watch. It was towards that same square that Jenia found herself walking to join the protest. Looking back, what surprises her is not the decision itself, but how instinctive it felt. ‘I realised I felt responsible,’ she tells me. For much of her life, belonging had meant searching for acceptance. Standing in the Square, it came to mean something else entirely: accepting responsibility for the place where you live. This was the moment when she understood that feeling at home was not simply about comfort or identity. It was about believing you had both the right — and perhaps even the obligation — to participate in shaping the future of a place. Once responsibility became her measure of belonging, the question of where to build her future acquired an entirely different meaning.

By then, the war had changed the calculus entirely. Jenia’s return to Tashkent had, in fact, begun several years earlier. From 2018 to 2022, she divided her time between Moscow and Tashkent: the design side of J.Kim was increasingly based in Uzbekistan, while much of the business development and communications still happened in Russia. After the invasion, that arrangement ended. Since 2022, she has lived in Tashkent full-time.

Many creatives left Moscow after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, some out of principle, some because staying no longer felt safe or possible, and looked to rebuild their careers abroad. The US, in particular, remained a real possibility for many, with its stronger infrastructure and market, its opportunities more immediate. Jenia had those same options. Instead, she chose to consolidate what she had already begun building in her hometown. But the decision wasn’t driven by nostalgia. When she speaks about Uzbekistan, she rarely romanticises it. She is acutely aware of its limitations. Building a fashion business here meant working in an ecosystem that barely existed. There are few manufacturers capable of producing the quality she wants, few experienced specialists to hire and little of the infrastructure that designers elsewhere often take for granted. Many of the obstacles she encountered could not simply be solved; they first had to be identified, because no one had confronted them before.

‘But if I leave,’ she says, ‘nothing changes.’ She pauses before continuing. ‘And if people stay, if enough people decide to build something here, then maybe the next generation won’t have to make the choice between staying and leaving at all.’ I understand those words, at first, as a statement about responsibility towards a place. It’s only later, meeting the people she’s persuaded to build that place alongside her, that I understand the second half of what she means: what she’s building in Tashkent isn’t only a fashion label. It’s something capable of convincing other people to imagine their futures there too. The idea extends well beyond fashion: Jenia speaks as readily about photographers, stylists, artists and directors as she does about designers. She imagines creative communities rather than individual careers, ecosystems rather than success stories. What interests her is not producing one internationally recognised brand, but contributing to an environment in which many more can emerge.

Jenia has begun thinking about what that infrastructure might look like in practice. One of her long-term ambitions is to establish an incubator, residency or competition for emerging Uzbek designers, developed with experts from around the world. She is less interested in teaching another generation how to make beautiful clothes than in giving them the less visible knowledge required to turn those clothes into viable businesses: brand building and product development, but also technical documentation, pricing, production and cost planning. She has already pitched the idea to a major foundation. Whether it happens remains uncertain, but the ambition itself says something about how she now understands her role. Building J.Kim is no longer enough. She wants to help build the conditions in which other brands might exist alongside it.

Stylist Kami Akhmed is one of the people for whom that kind of support has already mattered. When she was launching 7/1, a public talks project inviting figures from art and fashion to share their knowledge with aspiring young creatives in Tashkent, Jenia agreed to be its first speaker. ‘She supported what I was trying to do, gave me opportunities to express myself creatively and, perhaps without even knowing it, inspired me to attempt something bigger,’ Kami tells me. ‘To create within the culture that raised you, and to treat what you do with respect.’ She sees J.Kim as proof that staying does not necessarily mean thinking smaller. ‘Jenia and the J.Kim team are a great example of how you can build a brand locally but develop globally,’ she says. ‘I think that inspires young creatives here to trust their own ideas more.’ For Kami, what distinguishes Jenia is ultimately less about the success of the brand than the impulse behind it. ‘There are people who tell stories, and there are people who create them. Jenia is one of those people.’ She points to J.Kim House remaining in Tashkent, the brand’s collaborations with independent craftspeople whose practices are disappearing, and Jenia’s support of younger artists. ‘She cares. I care. The people around us care.’

Jenia often thinks about the decisions her own family had to make. Her parents did not leave Uzbekistan because they wanted to abandon it. Like so many families across the former Soviet Union, they moved because opportunity existed in Russia: better education, better work, better prospects for their children. Jenia hopes her daughter will grow up with a different kind of freedom — not the freedom to leave, but the freedom to choose. She wants her to inherit a country where staying does not require sacrificing ambition, where building a creative life is a genuine possibility. It is, perhaps, the same freedom Jenia spent years searching for herself: not the freedom to become someone else, but the freedom to become fully herself without believing her future exists somewhere else.

On my first evening in Tashkent, Jenia suggests dinner. We are joined by Dasha, her operations director, who moved to Uzbekistan from Saint Petersburg after the war began, having never before set foot in the country. The conversation wanders between work, Moscow versus Saint Petersburg, and how differently people our age drink now compared to a few years ago. Dasha says she rarely drinks anymore. Jenia nods; she hasn’t touched alcohol in months. ‘It changed my life,’ she says. Then, smiling: ‘But sometimes… sometimes it would feel so good to just get completely wasted.’ She uses the Russian word nabukhatsya, so gloriously unrefined after an evening of careful conversation that all three of us burst out laughing.

Jenia leaves before us, wanting to get back to her daughter. Dasha and I linger over the last glasses. Before joining J.Kim, she was a lawyer in Saint Petersburg; when Russia invaded Ukraine, she knew she had to leave, applied for the role on Instagram, and moved to a country she’d never set foot in. When I ask how her family reacted, she laughs. ‘They still don’t understand why I moved here. I think they are ashamed of my decision.’ The sentence lands almost casually, yet it exposes a hierarchy that continues to shape the post-Soviet imagination: for many Russians, Central Asia remains somewhere people leave, not somewhere they deliberately choose.

The first months were difficult. Dasha arrived as a young blonde Russian woman whose instinct was to smile, chat and make herself immediately familiar. Tashkent demanded a different rhythm. Relationships took longer to build. Trust was earned more slowly. But rather than expecting the city to accommodate her, she learnt to accommodate herself to it. ‘I am a foreigner here,’ she says simply. Not apologetically, nor romantically, but as a fact.

When I ask what it is like to work with Jenia, the answer comes immediately. ‘She’s very straightforward, and she knows exactly what she wants.’ There is admiration in her voice, but no idealisation. She tells me about opening J.Kim Objects, the brand’s concept store for homeware and vintage finds, inside Chorsu Bazaar, Tashkent’s sprawling, centuries-old covered market, an idea that made little practical sense to anyone else on the team, and that Jenia pushed for regardless, insisting on the bazaar because she knew exactly what she wanted the space to feel like. ‘My instinct is always to move on once something works,’ she says. ‘Jenia pushes us to keep going until it’s perfect. And I’m happy to be led by someone like her.’

It’s the same certainty, I realise, off the clock. In Paris, I’d taken Jenia’s silences for reserve. In Tashkent, I understood: she wasn’t being careful with me, she simply had nothing left to perform.

Photography by Abdulaziz (@transoxian)