Kirill Gasilin

Kirill Alekseevich Gasilin was born on 8 December 1978 in the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, now Kazakhstan. The exact town has not been made public. He grew up in a family of craftspeople. According to the New East Archive, his great-grandfather was a cabinet-maker and his grandmother was a silversmith, and that inherited respect for handwork showed in the construction of every garment he later made. As a young man he first studied in Leningrad before turning to textiles and design.

In 1995 Gasilin moved to Kharkiv and entered the Faculty of Textile and Light Industry at the Ukrainian Engineering Pedagogical Academy, graduating in 2000 with training in textiles and fashion design. He then began postgraduate research on a thesis titled "The Dependence of Colour Perception on Form". His real finishing school came in 2005, with an internship at the Paris haute couture house of Dominique Sirop, where he absorbed the French technique of immaculate inner seams that he believed separated couture from ready-to-wear.

Gasilin's career began with competitions. In 2001 he was a finalist of Tatiana Mikhalkova's Russian Silhouette contest with the collection "Rarities", shown at Gostiny Dvor in Moscow, and he won the Grand Prix at Alexander Vasiliev's Volga Seasons festival. In 2003 he became an assistant designer at the Moscow house Anna Rossa. From 2004 he worked with Vasiliev on exhibitions, catalogues and books about the history of costume and on restoring historical garments from the Vasiliev collection.

In 2007 he founded the Cyrille Gassiline label and presented its debut collection, "Legends of the Fjord", at Moscow Fashion Week. Later collections included "Favourites" (autumn-winter 2009/2010), shows at Volvo Fashion Week Moscow, "Passion" (spring-summer 2012) and an autumn-winter 2015 show dedicated to the memory of the actress Valentina Karavaeva. He worked from an atelier in Moscow's historic Trekhgornaya Manufactory, and his sizing ran up to European 54, still rare at the time. His last collection appeared in 2019.

As a theatre artist he designed costumes for the Tokyo National Ballet programme "The Afternoon of a Faun and His Nymph" (2005), "Life with an Emperor" at the Pushkin Museum (2006, with Vasiliev), "My Fair Lady" at the Russian Theatre in Tallinn (2020, with Vasiliev), "La Bayadère" at the Tbilisi State Opera and Ballet Theatre (2023), the ballet "Le Pari", and a "Swan Lake" with Nino Ananiashvili in Tbilisi (May 2026). He also created exhibitions in Moscow, St Petersburg, Baku, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Riga and Vilnius.

Gasilin was a private man who preferred, in the words of the New East Archive, to let his collections speak for themselves. In his last years he lived a very closed life and almost vanished from public view. His closest professional bond was with the fashion historian Alexander Vasiliev, his collaborator for more than twenty years, who noted that they were born on the same day, 8 December. Vasiliev remembered him as a loyal and devoted friend who loved ballet and dogs. No spouse or children have been publicly reported.

Gasilin believed that the inside of a garment mattered as much as the outside. He told the French site Trend & Tendance that it is the seam work itself that distinguishes couture from ready-to-wear, a lesson he took from Dominique Sirop. He also chose deliberately to dress real Russian women rather than catwalk-thin figures, designing for an average client between sizes 50 and 54. Vasiliev described him as a fighter for fairness and truth.

Anatole Vovk called Gasilin much more than a clothes designer: a great artist with his own vision who strongly influenced Russian fashion and how modern cut can be perceived. Meduza wrote that his distinctive cuts and colours helped shape contemporary Russian fashion, and The Voice Mag credited him with popularising blanket coats and bringing sophisticated shades and designer cuts within reach of many Russian women. Items from his collections entered exhibitions at the State Hermitage, and his costume work remains on stages in Tbilisi and beyond.

Gasilin was a finalist of the Russian Silhouette competition in 2001 and won the Grand Prix at Alexander Vasiliev's Volga Seasons festival. He is the subject of an entry in the Great Russian Encyclopedia. No state awards have been publicly reported.

Runway films of Cyrille Gassiline collections from 2009 to 2015 survive on YouTube, including the autumn-winter 2015 show posted by the label itself. Gasilin's exhibition work with the Vasiliev Foundation reached venues including Tsaritsyno, GUM, the Museum of Moscow, the Museum of Oriental Art, the Pushkin Museum, Vitebsky railway station in St Petersburg and the Heydar Aliyev Center in Baku, and he helped produce many catalogues of the foundation's collection.

Kirill Gasilin died on 4 October 2026 in a Moscow hospital, aged 47. His family told RIA Novosti that he had been ill for a long time, and Alexander Vasiliev said he died after a struggle with cancer. The death was first announced on 7 October 2026 by Anatole Vovk, which is why some early reports, including Wikipedia, give that date. A farewell was announced for Friday 9 October 2026 at 14:00 at a hospital ritual hall on Volokolamskoye Highway in Moscow, followed by cremation.