Apolitical, not asocial

The 24th Ukrainian Fashion Week will be held on March 12 to 17. On the eve of the event, the organizing committee chairperson Iryna Danylevska says that this springtime show will add optimism to Ukrainian society:

“Fashion is apolitical but not asocial. I would like to hope that the surrounding pessimism will not at all reflect on the collections and the latter will look optimistic and beautiful. After all, this is an autumn-winter collection, and this season inspires designers to better implement their creative ideas.”

The organizers say they continue to invite the world’s most influential fashion-column journalists to attend the Week’s shows. It will be recalled that among those who examined the collections of some Ukrainian designers last autumn were Hillary Alexander, fashion critic of the influential British daily The Daily Telegraph, and Godfrey Deeny, editor-in-chief of Fashion Wire Daily. This time foreign guests will include Yvan Rodic, one of the best-known fashion journalists and bloggers, who is also planning to conduct a seminar entitled “The Internet’s Impact on Fashion” for Ukrainian experts and journalists.

So Ukrainian fashionistas will soon personally see what kind of clothes they should get hold of at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010.

Danylevska is not exactly rushing to reveal the secrets of new trends. She says she never examines the designers’ creations before the Ukrainian Fashion Week begins. Nonetheless, in her view, the economic crisis is sure to make an imprint on fashion.

“I think designers will be opting for larger proportions and sizes. The crisis will, first of all, affect the type of textiles and colors. They will be more restrained: black, crimson, dark green, or maybe, the color of earth. A designer possesses not only a creative and artistic talent but also the social talent of foreseeing what will be occurring in the world,” she said to The Day.

Although the number of Fashion Week participants has declined due to the crisis, the organizers maintain that the traditional projects “New Names” and “Fresh Fashion,” aimed at discovering new talents, will remain intact. The selection of their designs is still continuing. Such well-known masters as Lilia Pustovit, Viktoria Hres, Oleksii Zalevsky, Tetiana Zemskova and Olena Vorozhbyt, Andr Tan, and Anna Bublyk will also come up with fresh ideas in clothing. A total of 40 designers are going to display their new collections. Among them is the Georgian designer Avtandil Tskvitinidze, now a regular contributor the Ukrainian Fashion Week, the Romanian Andre Tinca, and the UK-based Natalia Dolenko.

The fashion people cooperate with Olena Franchuk and the Anti-AIDS foundation once a year. They presented a military-style Anti-AIDS social collection last autumn, so now their springtime vogue clothes will have no subtexts. Nevertheless, the organizers claim that the very existence of the Ukrainian Fashion Week may be called a social project and the designers who manage to work in our conditions are nothing short of heroes.