Julian Zigerli’s FOREVERLI: 15 Years of Zurich’s Boldest Label

Last updated: July 21, 2026.

Fifteen years ago, a 26-year-old came home from art school in Berlin and started a menswear label in a city that dresses, by international consensus, in navy. This September, Julian Zigerli marks those fifteen years with something no Zurich label has quite attempted before: not a runway show, but a five-act performance built entirely from his own archive. It is called FOREVERLI, it happens on 19 September at the Albisgütli, and it is, by the organisers’ own description, a non-profit production funded by the people who buy tickets.

I have wanted to write about Zigerli properly for a long time, because he is the clean counter-argument to almost everything this blog documents about Swiss restraint. Where the city whispers, he prints. Where quiet luxury removes the logo, he adds a cartoon. And somehow he has done it for fifteen years from Zurich, not Paris. That is the story worth telling — the show is just the occasion.

FOREVERLI: everything confirmed so far

Start with the facts, because event details drift and I would rather you arrive on the right night. According to the published event information, the fashion house Julian Zigerli celebrates 15 years with a showcase titled FOREVERLI SHOW — 15 Years in 5 Acts: a performative retrospective drawing on Zigerli’s extensive archive, in which fashion, theatre, dance, music and performance merge into one production. It is directed by Livio Beyeler and produced by PIERRE Studio with the label’s creative lead.

One detail deserves emphasis, because it is unusual and says a great deal about independent fashion in Switzerland: the organisers state plainly that the show is only possible with support from the audience, that it is a non-profit project, and that every contribution goes directly into making it happen. A fifteen-year-old internationally shown label is crowdfunding its own anniversary. Hold that thought — we will come back to it.

Who Julian Zigerli actually is

Born in 1984 and raised in Switzerland — half Italian, as he has described himself — Zigerli left for Germany at 20 to study fashion design at the Berlin University of the Arts. After graduating in 2010 he returned to his roots in Zurich to found his eponymous label. It began as menswear and has since widened into womenswear, accessories, product lines and interior pieces.

The aesthetic has been consistent from the start, and it is the opposite of a Swiss cliché: useful, smart, technically high-class pieces with a sporty touch, always carrying love, colour, humour and positivity. In practice that means loud prints, saturated colour and cuts you can actually move in — frequently made in collaboration with artists, since print design is where the label has always been strongest. Collections have been presented in Berlin, London, Milan, New York, Paris, Seoul and Zurich.

The recognition arrived early and repeatedly. There was a Swiss Design Prize nomination in 2011, then Swiss Design Awards in 2012, 2014 and 2016, and the moment most people in Swiss fashion still cite: in 2014, Giorgio Armani personally invited Zigerli to present at the Armani/Teatro during Milan Fashion Week. He subsequently showed on the official Milan men’s calendar. For a self-founded Zurich label barely four years old, that is an extraordinary door to have opened.

The Swiss textile thread nobody mentions

Here is the detail that made me sit up, and the reason Zigerli belongs in this blog’s heritage story rather than beside it. One of the founding concepts of the label, as his own profile puts it, was to focus on constructing garments out of innovative Swiss textiles. Not Swiss folklore. Not Swiss scenery. Swiss fabric — the technical, engineered, quietly world-beating material that this country has produced for centuries.

Read against the rest of the archive on this site, that is a straight line through history. Zurich once ran on silk, and eastern Switzerland still supplies Paris couture with St. Gallen embroidery. Both industries survived by abandoning volume and keeping only excellence in the material itself. Zigerli, without any of the heritage costume, does the same thing in a contemporary register: the fabric is the serious part, the print is the joke on top. It is the most Swiss possible foundation for the least Swiss-looking clothes in the country.

Fifteen years of colour in a city that wears navy

Anyone who has read my Bahnhofstrasse street style field report knows what this city actually wears: neutrals, almost no visible branding, restraint as a default setting. Against that backdrop, sustaining a loud, print-driven, joyful label in Zurich for fifteen years is not a stylistic choice so much as an act of stubbornness.

And yet I think Zigerli is less opposed to Zurich than he first appears. Look past the prints and the values underneath are entirely local: technical fabric, real wearability, garments engineered to work rather than to photograph. It is quiet luxury’s obsession with substance, wearing a completely different outfit. The city’s rule is that quality should not shout; Zigerli keeps the quality and simply declines the second half of the sentence.

He belongs, in other words, to the same Zurich as the expressive scene I wrote about around the Queer Fashion Show — the half of this city that treats clothing as self-expression rather than social compliance. Fifteen years of that, from a base of eight million people with a national preference for beige, is genuinely remarkable.

Why a crowd-funded anniversary show is the real headline

Back to the detail I asked you to hold. A label with three Swiss Design Awards, an Armani invitation and a Milan calendar slot is financing its fifteenth-anniversary show through ticket sales, explicitly as a non-profit project. Read that as a fact about the industry rather than the designer. Switzerland produces exceptional fashion talent and almost none of the commercial infrastructure — the conglomerates, the investment groups, the fashion-week budgets — that carries equivalent designers in Paris or Milan.

So Swiss independents build their own. FOREVERLI is being staged in a Gasthaus rather than a fashion tent, directed by a theatre director rather than a show producer, and paid for by an audience the label calls its community. That is not a downgrade; it is a different model, and honestly a more interesting one. It also explains why the country’s best fashion moments increasingly look like cultural events rather than trade showcases.

There is a small irony worth naming, too. The Swiss Made label exists to protect the commercial value of Swiss provenance — a premium of up to half the sale price on luxury goods. Meanwhile the designers actually building Swiss fashion’s international reputation pass the hat to stage a show. The label is well protected. The talent is largely self-funded.

Going to FOREVERLI: practical notes

The show runs 20:00 to 22:00, with the after-party in the same venue from 22:00 until 04:00 — so this is a full night, not a two-hour cultural obligation. The Albisgütli is out on Uetlibergstrasse rather than in the centre, which means checking your late tram or train home before you commit to the 04:00 end. Tickets go through the Eventfrog listing; because the production is funded by ticket sales, buying early is doing more work than usual here.

As for what to wear: this is the one Zurich fashion event where dressing carefully in navy would miss the entire point. Print, colour, something with a sense of humour, shoes that survive six hours. If you want the general grammar of dressing for the city’s calendar, my guide to what to wear at Zurich events covers the rest of the season — but for this one, treat the audience as part of the show, because at a Zigerli event it always has been.

What fifteen years of Julian Zigerli actually proves

The easy version of this story is that a Swiss designer made colourful clothes and threw a party. The truer version is that someone built an internationally recognised fashion label from a mid-sized city with no fashion industry to speak of, on a foundation of local technical fabric, and kept it alive for fifteen years without moving to a fashion capital or softening the work to suit local taste. In a country that exports its talent as readily as its textiles, staying is the achievement.

FOREVERLI turns that into five acts and a night at the Albisgütli. Whether or not you go, the anniversary is worth marking, because it is the rarest thing in Swiss fashion: not a heritage story about what this country used to make, but a living one about what it still does. The names in my guide to Swiss designers worth knowing all owe something to independents who proved it could be done from here. Zigerli has been proving it since 2010, in prints you can see from across the tram.

FAQ: Julian Zigerli and the FOREVERLI show

When and where is the FOREVERLI show?

Saturday 19 September 2026 at Gasthaus Albisgütli, Uetlibergstrasse 341, 8045 Zürich. The show runs 20:00–22:00, followed by an after-show party in the same venue from 22:00 to 04:00 with PHUM, GUBERNATIS and DASHA. Tickets are sold through Eventfrog.

What is FOREVERLI?

A performative retrospective marking 15 years of the Julian Zigerli label, titled “FOREVERLI SHOW — 15 Years in 5 Acts”. Rather than a conventional runway, it draws on the label’s archive and merges fashion with theatre, dance, music and performance. It is directed by Livio Beyeler and produced by PIERRE Studio.

Who is Julian Zigerli?

A Swiss fashion designer born in 1984 who studied at the Berlin University of the Arts and founded his Zurich label after graduating in 2010. Known for bold prints, strong colour and technical, wearable pieces, he has won Swiss Design Awards in 2012, 2014 and 2016 and was invited by Giorgio Armani to show at the Armani/Teatro in Milan in 2014.

Why is the show crowd-funded?

The organisers describe FOREVERLI as an independent, non-profit production in which ticket purchases directly finance the show. It reflects a wider reality of Swiss fashion: internationally recognised designers here operate without the large commercial and fashion-week infrastructure available in Paris or Milan.

What should I wear to FOREVERLI?

Colour and print, not the city’s default neutrals. The evening celebrates an archive built on bright, playful, print-led design, and it runs from 20:00 through an after-party until 04:00 — so choose something expressive that you can comfortably wear for a long night.