Surzhana Radnaeva - BURYATIA (Siberia) / FRANCE.
“Surzhana Radnaeva is an interdisciplinary fashion designer, material researcher, and educator whose work is rooted in her Indigenous Buryat heritage and shaped by movement, transformation, and close listening to materials.
Her nomadic life unfolds on a wider scale than that of her ancestors. Raised in the vast Siberian steppes, shaped by the intensity of Moscow’s urban life, educated in art history at Moscow State University and fashion design at the Beijing Institute of Fashion Technology in China, she later worked within the world of luxury fashion. Each place left a trace; each transition became an essential layer of her practice.
Now based in France, Surzhana founded Traditional Futures in 2019 as a studio where ancestral knowledge meets contemporary practice. Working internationally, she is invited to lead workshops, give lectures, and collaborate on research-driven projects that bridge traditional techniques with modern tools. Her practice moves fluidly between making, teaching, and research, guided by curiosity, care, and hands-on experimentation.
Through traditional techniques, material exploration, and garment-making, Surzhana invites others to reconnect with cultural memory and inner landscapes. Her work translates heritage into contemporary forms, allowing ancestral practices to remain active, adaptable, and relevant in daily life. Sustainable biomaterials and traditional techniques are central to her approach, explored with sensitivity and a strong awareness of material life cycles.
Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Milan Design Week, Dutch Design Week, the Royal Textile Academy of Bhutan, the British Textile Biennial, Paris Fashion Tech, Icelandic Textile Center and other international platforms.
Rooted in tradition and attentive to the present, Surzhana’s practice builds bridges between past and future, hand and machine, memory and transformation, allowing inherited knowledge to continue living, evolving, and being shared.”
@traditional.futures on Instagram
