🎙️ As part of the public programme for the exhibition Unframed: Leis, Tabaka, Rožanskaitė, Zuzeum invites you to the lecture Riga Before the Glossy Magazines by Bruno Birmanis.
📅 Saturday, April 26, 2025, at 14:00
🎟️ Free entry with prior registration
🗣️ The lecture will be held in Latvian
What was fashion like in Riga before glossy magazines? How did it manifest in a time when clothing became a form of protest and personal manifesto? Fashion artist and one of the icons of Latvia’s alternative culture, Bruno Birmanis, will offer insight into the informal fashion scene of late-1980s Riga – a world where form and style served as tools for freedom, resistance, and self-expression.
This was fashion born outside official institutions – in clubs, apartments, and underground gatherings. It was a unique mix of bohemia, subcultures, and political reality. Birmanis will illuminate this period through specific events and places: semi-underground fashion shows and parties held at the Riga Polytechnic Institute’s Student Club in what is now the St. Saviour’s Anglican Church, and the independent theatre “Kabata”; the emergence of the Bruno Birmanis and Uģis Rūķītis Costume Theatre; and the first public model casting in Latvia, held in 1988.
The lecture will explore fashion as a reflection of its era and a mirror of social transformation, revealing how informal creative initiatives became significant cultural forms – and how the search for freedom through visual language continues to resonate in contemporary art.
About the lecturer
Bruno Birmanis is a fashion artist, designer, and educator. Born into a family of theatre actors, TV journalists, and architects, his worldview has been shaped by these intersecting disciplines. In the late 1980s, he became one of the pioneers of alternative fashion in Latvia, co-founding the legendary Bruno Birmanis and Uģis Rūķītis Costume Theatre and organising the groundbreaking The Untamed Fashion Assembly. Today, he also teaches at the Liepaja music, art and design secondary school.
*By attending this event, you agree to have photos or videos of you or your children taken for Zuzeum marketing purposes. You can refuse to be photographed or filmed by informing the photographer or camera person.