About Albena Gateva

For years, I searched for myself. I found her little by little, in numbers, in symbols, in a way of looking at things that has always felt like my own.

Fashion did not arrive by chance. It is my language, the way I express what I am. I spent a year studying fabrics, construction, and design choices, because I did not want to improvise something I had always admired from a distance. I wanted to understand it properly, inside and out. My eye was formed over a lifetime: taste built, observed, lived. In time, it became my voice.

I am a wife, I am a mother. The people I love come first.

Much of what I want to say through each garment comes from the women I have met along the way: from their stories, their strength, their silences. Those encounters gave rise to the desire to dress a woman in a way that gives voice to what makes her unique.

Every piece I design carries the name of a real woman. Someone I have met, who struck me by her character or her beauty.

That is how I see women: each with her own way of shining. Like stars, different from one another and able, together, to light the same sky.

From that same idea comes Women Supporting Women. A space alongside the clothes, where women can recognise themselves in one another and support one another, just as I would want my garments to make them feel when they wear them.

I myself was matter in transformation: first a butterfly, then a star.

I do not have all the answers. But I lived that transformation in my own skin, and from there comes the wish that every woman might find her own.