“Everything you look for is nearby”

Andre Tan, Olena Burenina, Artem Klymchuk, Ksenia Marchenko, Eduard Nasyrov, Olena Oliinyk, Galeb Al Maali… This is an incomplete list of names for which the All-Ukrainian Contest of Young Fashion Designers “Fashion Seasons – A look into the Future” became a path to the Ukrainian runway. This year the contest was held for the 12th time. Over 100 sketches of collections from 35 cities in Ukraine were submitted to the organizing committee. However, only 19 collections were selected for the final, representing nine cities, including

Lutsk, Mykolaiv, Lviv, Rivne, Kirovohrad, Ternopil, and Kyiv. This year marked the first time the contest was open to visitors, taking place on a specially set up runway along Khreshchatyk. This added a democratic flavor to the event, and placed greater responsibility on both the contest participants and the organizers.

This year’s collections were cha-racterized by youthful maximalism, hormones, and plans to change the world and create a fashion revolution. This is only to be expected from a contest for young designers. Many beginning designers appealed to social topics, environmental protection motives and counteracting global consumerism. Yaroslava-Maria Khomenko from Kyiv created a collection echoing the current problem of overproduction and consumption. The clothes were created by means of reconstructing readymade products that had gone out of fashion. Oksana Varenia dedicated her collection to eco-cities and the growing popularity of natural materials. This was seen not only in the concept of the collection, with its corresponding name Ecocity, but also in the use of natural materials, prints in ecological inks, and bags with solar mini-panels which can be used to charge telephones and notebooks. Recycled tires were also used, besides leather, to make these bags. This collection took the third place, which presupposes financial support for the designer’s participation in the international contest “Russian Silhouette” in September 2011.

While the image created by the bronze prize-winner appeals to our future, the collection of Uliana Nedoshytko of Lviv, which took the se-cond place (and brought to its author financial support for business development and creating a new collection) appeals to our past, namely to the period of the World War I. In the collection Peaceful Warrior the designer adapts to the requirements of the contemporary woman’s image a military uniform of the early 20th century.

As Lilia Poustovit, a famous Ukrainian designer and head of the contest jury and of the Expert Committee of the Ukrainian Fashion Council, many of the contest’s participants remembered that fashion is not just about lofty ideas and concepts — that it is a business and not show business.

“It seems to me that the level of young designers has been growing with the years. Previously they highlighted something very expressive, theatrical, and now many of them create clothes. Actually, ‘Look into the Future’ is precisely a pret-a-porter contest,” Lilia Poustovit says. “The works represented this year really have many handmade, interesting elements, but they are clothes one can wear. This is not pure art. Young designers began to grow in their realization that fashion is industry, and not show business.”

The modern history of Ukrainian fashion includes many attempts to rethink the Ukrainian ethno-style. However, not all designers, even experienced ones, managed to do it. Obviously the point is not only in experience but also in how deep and delicate the designers’ sense of their own cultural layers is. Among the 19 young designers Natalia Mishchenko from Voznesensk, Mykolaiv oblast, was the only one who tried to work in the rather risky sphere of national costume interpretation. The collection Identification ETHNO, based on the motives of costumes from central Ukraine of the late 19th and early 20th century, according to the designer, was an attempt to create mo-dern integral images through her own vision of national costume traditions. This attempt turned out to be a success, and Natalia won the Grand Prix — a two-week training session at the University of the Arts in London.

“This is already my second collection in ethnic style,” the designer told The Day. “Here I consciously rejected color, which is abundant in national costumes, in order to render the play of textures, the sculpted character of the silhouette. I interpret Ukrainian national embroidery in a new way — through volume modules. I suppose one doesn’t need to go overseas to look for what is already here, nearby. One can find many interesting ideas in Ukrainian national clothes. In addition, this is ours, this is in our blood. I think this is not my last ethnic-style collection,” the winner of the contest said.

“Fashion Seasons – A Look into the Future” is a stable supply of fresh blood for Ukrainian fashion. Today it is difficult to believe that in the past this crowd of promising but almost unknown designers included the stars of Ukrainian fashion Andre Tan or Ksenia Marchenko — young designer whose creations are sold aside those of prominent Europeans like Gareth Pugh and Rick Owens.

Among the muddle of the capital’s events dedicated to Kyiv’s Day, an activity involving talented youth and investing in its future looks somewhat out of place. Indeed, it is a look into the future. There are so few organized and consistent activities supporting young talents in our country that one can hardly criticize it. However, one may question the choice of a beer brand to sponsor talented youths in a country suffering from devastating levels of juvenile alcoholism — where 40 percent of people between the ages of 14 and 18 consume alcoholic beverages (according to the data of the World Health Organization), and where one has to introduce nationwide anti-alcohol campaigns already in high school (see Den, issue 24-25, February 11, 2011). In our opinion, the models walking on the runway with bottles of beer in their hands looked quite far from the image of young and progressive people. Certainly, in this case the point is not in the unscrupulousness of the organizers but in the difficulties in searching sponsors for such events. Nobody is queuing to help out the fledging Ukrainian fashion industry. Here we are: there is nobody to support the young and talented people everyone is waiting so much for. Aside from a beer producer.