The shirt that speaks
Among the Eastern Slavs, everything starts from a white linen shirt, the vyshyvanka. On this pale ground, the embroidery gathers where the body opens: the collar, the cuffs, the ends of the sleeves, the hem. These places passed for weak points, the ones through which evil could enter. The embroidery made a barrier.
The colours and motifs read like a map. Red calls life and love, black speaks of the earth and mourning. In Podolia, they embroider geometric red and black; in Poltava, white on white, almost invisible; elsewhere, beads are added. Originally, a Ukrainian woman could tell at a glance where a shirt came from.
Each counted stitch, laid thread by thread on the weave, carried a sign: the sun, the star, the diamond of fertility, the tree of life. An embroidered shirt was a wish worn on the body, not a mere ornament.
The linen of memory
Alongside the shirt is another sacred cloth: the rushnyk, that long embroidered length that is nothing like an ordinary towel. It accompanies a whole life. On it, bread and salt are offered to the guest; the couple stand on it during the ceremony; icons are draped with it; the coffin is covered with it.
Its embroidery, often red on white, unrolls trees of life, facing birds, stars. Each sign has a meaning handed from mother to daughter. The rushnyk does not decorate the house: it binds the living to the ancestors, like a red thread stretched across the generations.
In Belarus, this same red-and-white language, all diamonds and crosses, became so much a signature that it was put on the national flag. A linen ornament promoted to the emblem of a whole people.
The vinok and the coral
On the head of a girl of marrying age, in Ukraine, blooms the vinok: a crown of flowers from which long coloured ribbons hang down the back. Each ribbon colour has its meaning, and the crown itself said that the one wearing it was free. Once married, her hair was covered.
Around the neck pile the strands of namysto, those necklaces of red coral beads. As almost everywhere in this notebook, gold and coral were not only adornment: they told the family's wealth and were held to keep the wearer's health.
The whole, embroidered shirt, crown of flowers and coral, forms one of the most recognisable images in Europe. And one of the most alive, as we shall see.
The sarafan and the kokoshnik
Cross to the Russian side, and the silhouette changes. The woman wears the sarafan, a full sleeveless pinafore dress, slipped over the linen shirt. Among peasant women it was of plain cloth; among the merchant and the rich, of heavy brocade woven with gold and flowers.
Above it, the queen piece: the kokoshnik. This tall fan- or crescent-shaped headdress, mounted on card and covered with beads, gold threads and sometimes freshwater pearls, crowned married women. The richer the house, the higher the kokoshnik rose and the more it shone.
It is a splendour that comes from afar, from the Russia of the boyars and the tsars, and that fascinated all of Europe. The courts and the balls seized on it, right down to the couturiers of the twentieth century. Few folk headdresses had such a career.
The flowered shawl
There is a Russian piece everyone knows without always naming it: the large flowered wool shawl, that of Pavlovo Posad, a town near Moscow. On a black, red or cream ground bloom enormous printed bouquets of roses, ringed with garlands.
Born in the nineteenth century, it has never ceased to be made or worn. The peasant woman as much as the townswoman covered her head and shoulders with it in winter, and still does. It is the example of a traditional accessory that crossed regimes and fashions without ever becoming a museum piece.
Warm, sturdy, passed on, decorated without being loud: this shawl ticks just about every box of what we love. An everyday object kept for decades and handed to a daughter.
An embroidery that does not die
Of all this notebook, the vyshyvanka is perhaps the most living tradition. Far from being confined to folk festivals, the embroidered shirt is worn today at the office, in the street, on social media. Ukraine even devotes a day to it, Vyshyvanka Day, when people come to work in an embroidered shirt.
Since the country's recent ordeals, this garment has taken on a new charge. To wear your vyshyvanka is to show who you are, to lay claim to a culture that others tried to erase. Grandmother's embroidery has become a flag you wear on your back.
There is a lesson here that goes beyond Ukraine. A traditional garment does not survive because it is shut in a display case, but because people go on wearing it, sewing it and giving it a fresh meaning. That is all we wish, at our scale, for the pieces we make.
