Dilyara Minrakhmanova

We often laugh that running a fashion brand here is like being in the Wild East. There is no established industry in Russia.

She chose alone. Two years later, the international business that had validated that choice disappeared overnight, and she had to make roughly the same decision again — this time with no partner to have left in the first place, and far more at stake.

From Chinese studies to a first collection #

Minrakhmanova did not train as a designer. She earned two university diplomas — one in political science, one as a Chinese-language referent-translator — and it was during a Beijing internship in 2009, as a student of Chinese studies at Moscow’s RUDN university, that she met Maksim Bashkaev (Максим Башкаев), a fellow student who would become her co-founder. Neither had a credential that pointed toward fashion. What they had, by the brand’s own account, was a single coat Minrakhmanova had sewn herself — she had been sewing since childhood — persuasive enough that in 2014 the two of them committed roughly ₽100,000 between them to a first collection of five coats, produced not in Moscow but in Naberezhnye Chelny (Набережные Челны), a Tatarstan industrial town with no fashion infrastructure to speak of.

For the first six years, the partnership worked in a fairly conventional division: Minrakhmanova led design, production, and visual direction and the brand’s womenswear; Bashkaev led marketing, management, and graphics and its menswear. Both had spent years studying a language and a culture — Chinese, in Minrakhmanova’s case, professional enough that she held a formal translator’s qualification — that had nothing to do with the industry they went on to build a brand in; the fashion label was, by its own founders’ account, a second act neither had trained for. The brand’s early recognition followed that unlikely start — a 2016 SHOWstudio Fashion Film Award, mentored by the photographer Nick Knight, brought a validation that pure retail sales in Moscow had not. By 2019, Minrakhmanova had been named individually to Forbes Russia’s “30 Under 30” list, a marker of personal recognition distinct from the brand’s own growing reputation.

The first choice: continue alone #

Then, in January 2020, the partnership dissolved. Bashkaev departed to found EXODVS, a media and anthropology project unrelated to fashion, during a period Minrakhmanova has described as a mutual decision reached mid-pandemic. What made the moment a genuine test rather than a straightforward transition was the absence of any clear playbook for what came next: she could have wound the brand down, treated the split as a natural endpoint for a project that had already had its best moment. Instead she took over as sole owner and creative director, betting that the label was worth continuing without the partner who had co-built it.

The decision carried a specific kind of risk that a founder starting something alone from the outset never has to weigh: Outlaw Moscow’s identity, its visual language, and its early recognition had all been built jointly. Continuing meant asserting that the brand’s substance belonged to her as much as to the partnership that made it — a claim untestable until she actually ran the company solo and the results either confirmed it or didn’t. There was no institutional or family backing to fall back on if the bet failed; the registered legal entity behind the brand was, and remained, a microenterprise.

A second, larger rupture #

That bet had barely had time to prove itself when a second, much larger rupture arrived. From February 2022, the international access that had carried Outlaw Moscow’s reputation — a US distributor, concept-store buyers in the US and Japan, the retail relationships built around two 2018 PUMA collaborations — was severed within weeks. Where the 2020 crisis had been personal and internal, this one was structural and external, and it landed on a brand that had only just stabilized under her sole leadership. There was no longer a co-founder to share the decision with, and no longer an international market to fall back on if the domestic pivot failed.

It is this second test, not the first, that gives the 2020 decision its real weight. A founder who takes sole control after a partner’s exit and then never has that control tested again can only claim the choice worked in the narrow sense that the lights stayed on. Minrakhmanova’s second test was not narrow: the international revenue base that had justified Outlaw Moscow’s existence as an internationally-oriented label — the US distributor, the concept-store buyers, the PUMA-era retail relationships — disappeared inside a matter of weeks, with no institutional partner left to absorb any part of the shock and no co-founder left to share the call on how to respond.

What the second test proved #

In 2023, in her first major public interview about the reinvention, Minrakhmanova spoke about rebuilding the brand alone after both the partnership’s end and the international collapse — describing the turnaround, in her own framing, as personal as much as commercial. She reported growth of “more than 100%” since the pivot, a self-reported and unaudited figure, but one that stands as the clearest public claim that the choice to continue alone in 2020 was not simply survived but vindicated by what came after.

The same question, twice #

What the two crises share is a single underlying question, asked twice: whether a venture she had not built to run solo was still hers to carry once the circumstances that shaped it had changed entirely. Twice, she answered by continuing rather than closing — first when the person she started it with left, and again when the market that justified starting it in the first place did.

Neither answer was inevitable. A brand whose reputation rested on international recognition — a Nick Knight-mentored film award, PUMA collaborations, buyers in three foreign markets — had every reason, after 2022, to treat its foreign audience as the only one worth building for, and to read its loss as terminal. Minrakhmanova’s response instead treated the domestic market she and Bashkaev had never prioritized as still worth designing for, using ownership structures — the Naberezhnye Chelny production, the Moscow retail footprint — that the partnership had built years before either crisis was foreseeable. The continuity between the two decisions is not that each was easy, but that both assumed the brand’s value lived in what it could still make and sell, not in the specific partner or market that had once validated it.

Last updated: October 10, 2026

Researched 30 sources in English, Russian.