Elene Betlemishvili

Elene Betlemishvili

Fashion Designer, MA Candidate

Elene Betlemishvili is a Tbilisi-based fashion designer and second-year MA candidate in Fashion Design at the Apollon Kutateladze Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Her practice moves between historical research, hand-worked textile technique and speculative material technology, reading ballet archives, botanical dye chemistry and mechanical form as sources for wearable sculpture rather than decoration. For her bachelor’s diploma project, Biotech, she experimented with 3D printing, garment construction and textile applications, exploring material innovation and additive manufacturing in fashion design.

Her work has been presented in group and solo exhibitions in Tbilisi and Kachreti, including a 2026 solo exhibition developed with the Ministry of Culture of Georgia, and recognised internationally through the OffScript design competition (Montreal). She also creates under the name Lenora Lea and works with the hand-pleating technique Al Alamia Plisse (Global Pleating).

Chronotope: The Geometry of Life
Solo exhibition, Global Design, Ministry of Culture of Georgia × Global Pleating, Tbilisi, 26 February – 2 March 2026

Chronotope follows one archetype, the river, gold and the woman who guards passage between them, across two ancient civilisations that never met: Egypt and Colchis. Its centrepiece garment, River Guardian, reads the Nile and the Rioni as a single continuous structure, a channel that carries memory, trade and power. Built scale by scale in hand-pleated textile, the garment’s surface sits between water and stone; gold marks what survives (residue, ritual, inheritance), while black holds the depth of time the river keeps.

Le Train Bleu, with Ana Baramidze, 2026: a contemporary reinterpretation of the 1924 ballet Le Train Bleu.