GUNIA Project Presents Renovated Store and Naïve My Love Book at Ukrainian Fashion Week

GUNIA Project has reopened its first flagship store at 4/6 Antonovycha Street following a two-month renovation and presented its collaboration with French publishing house Assouline — the book Naïve My Love. Both events were included in the official Ukrainian Fashion Week programme.

“The GUNIA Project store at 4/6 Antonovycha Street is our first fully-fledged space, and it has witnessed many changes and transformations within the brand. Its renovation is a major event for us because it is always difficult to change something that already works beautifully. At the same time, we believe that you should never stop at what you have already achieved, which is why we are constantly raising the bar for ourselves.

The new store will give us even more opportunities to present the new product categories that have emerged since the space first opened. It will also make the experience of spending time in the store, trying things on, and making a choice as enjoyable as possible. We believe this is the right step at the right time, and one that will delight our Gunia Family,” say the brand’s co-founders Natalia Kamenska and Maria Havryliuk.

The new interior of the Antonovycha Street store continues GUNIA Project’s collaboration with Temp Project, the architectural studio behind the brand’s store at 2A Zolotovoritska Street. The renovation was driven by a desire to enhance the customer experience while turning the space into a stage where the architecture does not compete with the brand’s products.

“The new GUNIA Project showroom on Antonovycha Street continues the development of the brand’s spatial concept while also establishing a dialogue with its new store at 2A Zolotovoritska Street. Compared to the previous space, the interior is now lighter, more open, and more adaptable.

At the same time, it retains GUNIA Project’s distinctive museum-like approach to objects — treating them as pieces behind which stand research, craft techniques, and cultural histories. The new showroom reflects the changes the brand has undergone in recent years. Some familiar elements remain, but overall, the space has become more contemporary and functional.

The architectural solutions are deliberately restrained, allowing the collections and objects of GUNIA Project to remain the focus. The space is designed to evolve alongside the brand, its new collections, and changing formats of work, while preserving the integrity of its visual language,” says project architect and founder of Temp Project Anastasiia Tempynska.

Another important part of the event was the presentation of the book Naïve My Love: Ukrainian Art of the 20th Century.Some of the world’s most remarkable works of art were created by people who developed their skills not through academic education, but through practice, continuous learning, and knowledge passed down from one master to another. This is the tradition from which naïve art emerged.

Unlike academic art, these works focused on conveying emotion and expressing imagination directly and intuitively. Naïve My Love: Ukrainian Art of the 20th Century documents a unique artistic phenomenon that developed in Ukraine in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The publication was conceived and creatively directed by Maria Havryliuk and Natalia Kamenska, founders of Ukrainian brand GUNIA Project, while the collaboration was initiated by media agency GOGOLA. The selection of works and curatorial work were carried out by editor Lidiia Lykhach, with texts written by Ukrainian journalist Anna Lodyhina.

The book features works by artists who had no formal artistic education and remained outside academic circles. Today, their works can be found in museums in Kyiv and other cities around the world, although some were considered lost for decades. Some pieces were rediscovered only after their authors’ deaths, while others survived solely on the walls of houses, furniture, and everyday objects in Ukrainian villages.

The publication introduces readers to the most significant names and works of 20th-century Ukrainian naïve art, while also exploring its influence on the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s and on contemporary design.The project was made possible with the support of Nova Ukraine, Bilokin Initiative, Sushko Philanthropy, Jorge & Maria Romo Foundation, Tokarev Foundation, ALIPH Foundation, and xpate.