Stas Falkov

It's a way to integrate into a new society — if they don't invite you into the gallery or the fashion magazine, build your own gallery, your own magazine.

Arriving with no door to knock on #

Falkov arrived in Moscow in 2009 from Tyumen, a Siberian city with no meaningful connection to Russia’s fashion industry, carrying no design pedigree and no professional network. The culture shock, by his own account, pulled him toward photography — a way to look closely at a city that hadn’t asked him in. For four years the relationship between Falkov and Moscow stayed exactly that one-sided: he observed an industry from its edges without a credential that would let him enter it, working ordinary jobs to support himself while he tried to work out what photography could actually get him. He trained formally in 2013, completing a two-week fashion-photography intensive at Moscow’s British Higher School of Art and Design, and started shooting commercial work for Puma, adidas and local streetwear labels. That work was competent enough to pay bills. It was not enough to open the doors he actually wanted opened: Russia’s fashion glossies, the outlets whose attention would have signaled he belonged in the industry he was photographing from its edges.

The gap between commercial competence and institutional acceptance is a familiar one in creative industries generally, and it rarely resolves quickly on its own. For Falkov it did not resolve at all — not through the glossies, at least. Four years passed between his arrival in Moscow and the training that made him professionally employable; two more passed between that training and the moment he stopped waiting for an editor to say yes.

The rejection was not a single dramatic event — it was sustained, unremarkable, and precisely the kind of setback that produces no headline. Portfolio after portfolio went out; none returned an invitation. Falkov was left with the quiet question every outsider eventually asks: whether the years already spent were building toward something, or just accumulating evidence that he didn’t belong. No verbatim record of that self-doubt survives in the public account — the moment is reconstructed from his documented history of rejection and from how decisively he answered it, not from a quote he gave at the time.

Building the room himself #

The answer came on 14 April 2015: kruzhok.moscow, an online photo-journal built to platform the emerging Russian photographers the mainstream press was ignoring — including, implicitly, photographers like himself. “It’s a way to integrate into a new society,” Falkov said years later, reflecting on the method rather than the specific moment, “if they don’t invite you into the gallery or the fashion magazine, build your own gallery, your own magazine.” The line reads as strategy in hindsight. At the time, it was closer to the only option left. He later described the same instinct to students at the Higher School of Economics’ design faculty, where he was invited to lecture on the journal’s origin and its 2017 pivot into design — proof, by then, that the institution he’d built without permission had become one worth studying.

The journal did not stay a journal. In 2017, Falkov printed one of his own photographs on a T-shirt — a single garment that turned a publishing project into a label, and the label into something larger over the following years: a streetwear brand, then an upcycling atelier, a radio station, a creative agency and a record label, all operating under the Kruzhok name. Falkov ran this expanding structure less as a conventional company than as what he called a creative association — a small, named team rather than an anonymous org chart, each person responsible for one discipline inside the whole. What began as one rejected photographer’s answer to institutional silence became, by 2018, a collaborator the Museum of Cosmonautics sought out directly. “In 2018 we worked with the Museum of Cosmonautics,” Falkov later reflected. “It felt as if in the 1990s the thread between past and future had been cut… I wanted to restore that thread, to build a bridge between Soviet heritage and contemporary design.” The line captures something true about Falkov’s whole method: he treated cultural material other people had abandoned — Soviet cosmonautics imagery, institutional aesthetics nobody was romanticizing in 2015 — the same way he had once wanted a magazine to treat his own unproven work: worth taking seriously, not worth waiting for permission to use.

Running four disciplines from one room #

By the early 2020s Falkov was running a genuine multidisciplinary institution rather than a single brand — a role that required him to be physically present across four distinct creative functions at once, from a Moscow showroom and campus he had built at the Flacon Design Factory. The site combined a retail showroom, an upcycling atelier, a radio studio and a bar under one roof, and Falkov’s own ambitions extended further still: stated plans toward an alternative Moscow fashion week, run on his own institution’s terms rather than the established calendar’s. In 2021 he organized a pop-up expedition that sent roughly a hundred people, in identical cloaks, to the science town of Pushchino outside Moscow — a gesture with no product attached, built purely to test how far the community he’d assembled would follow him into an unfamiliar setting. It was, in miniature, the same bet that had defined his whole career: that an audience existed for a version of Russian identity built from research institutes and cosmonautics rather than imported rebellion, if only someone built the occasion for it to gather.

“Right now our only constraint is time,” he told The Blueprint that August, at what reads as the confidence peak of his Moscow years. “We see no other obstacles — Kruzhok’s format can be anything.” Domestic peers working similar Soviet-code territory — Volchok, Sputnik 1985 — stayed narrower, product-only labels; Falkov’s decision to keep expanding into radio, agency work and eventually a full campus was his own choice, not a competitive necessity, and it made him personally load-bearing across more functions than any single-discipline founder would have needed to be. That confidence did not survive 2022 intact.

When the ground moved #

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine sent Falkov into emigration to France in 2022 — a rupture that was, for him personally, not primarily about the brand’s Western partnerships collapsing, though they did, but about rebuilding an entire life in a new country while still trying to run the institution he’d spent seven years assembling, now from a distance. Unlike the 2015 rejection, this crisis was not one he had any hand in creating or any real capacity to resolve through effort alone — it was imposed from outside, by a war whose consequences reached a small Moscow streetwear collective through the ordinary mechanism of a founder needing to leave his own country. He has since described the period as one that forces continual reinvention — a state he has said he wants to stay in, “though sometimes it frightens me.” A 2022 capsule marking fifty years since poet Joseph Brodsky’s own exile landed, for a founder who had left Russia the same year the capsule was conceived, as something closer to self-portrait than curatorial choice.

The distance proved unsustainable for the brand, though not for Falkov’s own creative instinct. Prints were delegated to a neural network in the brand’s final year, a workaround for a team now scattered across two countries rather than a design choice — Falkov later framed the improvisation candidly rather than presenting it as some deliberate innovation. Kruzhok closed in March 2024, nine years after the photo-journal’s first post. The same period, Falkov was completing a different chapter: a fine-art degree, DNSEP with honors, from the École supérieure d’art et design in Le Havre-Rouen — the culmination of a personal painting and text practice, Un voyage sans fin, he’d started during 2020’s pandemic isolation, a quieter, more introspective register than Kruzhok’s had ever required. Within the same year he founded FAUX, a new Paris project combining a gallery, a music label and a post-apocalyptic upcycle brand, and began co-running an art space called Microcredit out of a Paris squat alongside another artist — the kind of informal, self-organized venue that exists precisely because no established institution offered its own. The redirection was immediate, not a gap year spent deciding what came next — the same instinct that had answered institutional rejection in 2015 simply found a new register, and a new language, to work in. Falkov gives interviews in Russian, his native language, but now operates day to day in French and English — the working languages of the Paris art scene he entered with no more formal standing than he’d once had in Moscow’s fashion press.

What repeats, and what doesn’t #

Falkov’s arc is not a story about one lucky break that resolved a young photographer’s doubt. It is a story about a method that worked twice, in two different countries, under two different sets of constraints. Rejected by Russia’s fashion press, he built his own platform rather than continuing to seek their approval. Forced out of Russia by a war he had no part in starting, and out of the institution he’d spent nine years building, he built another one — in a new language, a new city, a new medium — almost without pause. The two crises are not symmetrical: the first was a slow, private accumulation of unanswered submissions; the second was a single geopolitical event that arrived without warning and gave him no choice in the timing. What connects them is the response, not the shape of the trigger — in both cases, Falkov’s answer to a closed door was to stop treating it as the only door available.

The lesson he offers is not that persistence guarantees an outcome; Kruzhok did, in the end, close, and its closure was never officially explained beyond the fact of the closure itself. It is that gatekeeper rejection describes the gatekeeper’s limits, not the applicant’s worth, and that the same self-authorizing response — build the room yourself — is available every time the ground moves, not just the first time. Falkov’s own account of his method, given in Paris looking back at Moscow, treats the two chapters as continuous rather than as a first act and a comeback: the instinct that built kruzhok.moscow in 2015 is, in his telling, the same one now building FAUX, just in a different register. He draws no real distinction between the two cities, and by his own account, none is needed — the method travels intact even when the language, the medium and the audience do not.

Last updated: October 10, 2026

Researched 23 sources in English, Russian.