On October 4 this year, 150 guests packed into the "La Rotonde" hall at the Shangri-La hotel in Paris, once home to Prince Roland Bonaparte, for a solo show by Bulgarian brand LORRETI by Lora Lilova. The show was part of the official Paris Fashion Week calendar.
A few days earlier, on September 26, the same collection was shown for the first time in Sofia, at the tENTA space, during Code Fashion Runway's "Fashion After Dark" evening. The idea was to let Bulgarian audiences see the dresses before they travelled to Paris. After the Sofia show there was a party with DJ Yordan Petkov, deliberately styled to contrast with the elegance of the runway show — bright colours and, as organisers put it, the freedom to be different.
The first collection in Ruse in 1991
The brand's story began 35 years ago in Ruse, in a small studio opened by engineer and dressmaker Pavleta Lilova. In 1991 she showed her first collection of leather clothes on the runway. "Fashion was never a choice for me," she says. Her daughter Lora grew up surrounded by fabric and sewing machines — sewing clothes for Barbie dolls at seven, and at fourteen making a dress for herself that still appears, unchanged, in the brand's catalogue today.
Lora Lilova, now 26, graduated with honours from the English Language School in Ruse and was accepted third out of more than 160 applicants to the fashion programme at the National Academy of Art in Sofia. The business began with wedding and prom dresses made in Ruse before the brand turned to formal womenswear. The turning point came when a LORRETI dress was worn by Miss France at the Cannes Film Festival. "That's when I realised people really saw me and valued my work," Lilova says.
Red carpets in Cannes and Venice followed, along with Milan Bridal Week and covers for Marie Claire, Grazia, Vogue and Vanity Fair. In 2025, Lilova became the first Bulgarian designer to get official accreditation from the Cannes Film Academy, and that same year she also appeared at the Venice festival. Invited personally by Forbes France founder Dominique Busso, she also attended the Villa Forbes event. Harper's Bazaar wrote that 2024 was a defining year for the brand because Lilova is "building a legacy." LORRETI now has more than 50,000 customers, makes everything within the EU and runs showrooms in Sofia and Ruse.
Prince Roland Bonaparte's residence
The building that hosted LORRETI's guests was built between 1892 and 1896 for Prince Roland Bonaparte, a distant relative of Napoleon I, by architect Ernest Janty, who had earlier worked on restoring the Louvre and the Tuileries for Napoleon III. The prince lived there until his death in 1924, and the halls now used for fashion shows are listed as historic monuments. The Shangri-La group bought the building in 2006, spent four years restoring it and opened the hotel at the end of 2010; in 2014 it was awarded "palace" status, the highest rating for a luxury hotel in France.
Alongside the show at La Rotonde, LORRETI also staged its first international exhibition of dresses, showing other designs from its collections beyond those on the runway.
Lilova's team is already planning its next step after Paris: LILOVA PRODUCTION, an agency that will work with models, designers and other creatives.