Ukraine fashion soldiers on

When it comes to fashion in Ukraine, according to Julie Pelipas, “we have always had to fight for something”. The former fashion director of Vogue Ukraine who currently helms Bettter, a Kyiv-based vintage tailoring brand, is reflecting on a market that has only relatively recently flourished on the global stage. But her words carry added bite in the context of Russia’s February 24 invasion.

Speaking over video-link from her home in Kyiv at the end of June, Mariupol-born Pelipas cites an absence of an established fashion industry as having historically fuelled her compatriots’ sense of determination and willingness to reinvent themselves. “Since [Ukrainian designers] didn’t grow up in a system that educated them about the rules, there is that notch of wildness in their approach,” she says. “Something big never comes out of the comfort zone.”

While a comfort zone is vastly different from a war zone, today that impulse for wildness is proving indispensable. How else to manage a staff evacuation where you are forced to rely on the kindness of a minor Turkish supplier to personally drive to the border to rescue your Kyiv-based team, as happened to the designers behind Sleeper, a loungewear brand whose feather-trimmed pyjamas have featured on Sex and the City? How else to adapt when orders are flooding in but your workforce has shrunk to a third of its former size, as experienced by designer Ksenia Schnaider, now running her eponymous brand from Germany, having fled Kyiv with her 11-year-old daughter?

Ukrainians have been here before. It’s no coincidence that as the country lurched through a period of social unrest in 2014, Ukrainian designers began to make an impression in the west. Against the backdrop of a bloody revolution, Zaporizhia-born Anna October, Crimean-born Helena Lumelsky and Odesa-born Julie Paskal made the shortlist of the inaugural LVMH Prize, picking up big-name international stockists in the process. The following year, Kyiv-born Anton Belinskiy also made the list.

All of the designers made lasting impressions on Julie Gilhart, who helped to launch the prize. The former Barneys fashion director, now president of Tomorrow Consulting, says: “They have a shared tenacity and vision for the future of Ukrainian fashion. There is a will not only to survive but refusal to be defined or hindered by tragedy.”

Commercially speaking, their strength lies, on some level, on a mono-product approach that exploits a niche. “I love their honesty, their singular point of view — there’s something very pure and poetic about it,” says Sarah Andelman, the retail consultant whose influential Paris store Colette stocked numerous Ukrainian designers prior to its closure in 2017. Take Vita Kin, an eponymous womenswear label founded in 2014, which has the market in exuberantly embroidered vyshyvanka dresses inspired by traditional Ukrainian dress sewn up. Ienki Ienki, too, does a fine trade in candy-coloured down jackets. Ruslan Baginskiy boasts a following for his hats that includes Madonna. And Anna October has perfected silk slip dresses, produced this season in Kyiv to a soundtrack of air raid alerts while she managed distribution from Paris.

“It’s like the Japanese [philosophy],” muses Kate Zubarieva, co-founder of Sleeper, whose focus on linen loungewear proved a masterstroke during the pandemic when comfortable homebody clothes reached critical mass. “Do what you love, and do it well.”

Before, we were competitors — now, we are friends

Ksenia Schnaider’s hero product is denim. A potent symbol of post-Soviet Union liberation (Levi’s 501s were highly prized on Soviet Russia’s black market), denim has always had cachet for Kyiv born-and-bred Schnaider. At 38 she is old enough to recall her parents sharing one pair of jeans between them, purchased by her father on a business trip to Italy, and worn on alternate days. “Having a fur coat was very basic, because everyone had them,” she recalls. Denim, by contrast, was “a symbol of change. They valued jeans like luxury”.

Since founding her label in 2011 with her husband Anton, Schnaider has turned out jeans made from upcycled denim — some with unusual cut-outs, some asymmetrical with one skinny and one wide leg, some with distressed fringing — that are social media dynamite. Billie Eilish and Bella Hadid are fans. “For me, denim is not everyday basic wear,” Schnaider insists.

For Schnaider and others, a longstanding interest in upcycling has proved invaluable when sourcing new material is difficult. “Buyers ask me, ‘Will you be able to produce 200 pairs of jeans for us?’ I’m like, it’s no problem. Even with the war, these markets are working in Kyiv and we are still able to source denim from them,” she says. For Pelipas, a stylist and street-style star whose talent for making second-hand men’s suits five sizes too big for her look effortlessly cool has spawned a business, upcycling has huge potential. “It was never developed because it’s not profitable in the short term,” she explains. Nevertheless, having created an algorithm for her label Bettter that alters men’s suits to fit smaller women’s sizes without compromising on proportions, she has a devoted band of customers who set their alarms for the latest limited-edition drop. “We sold out the first day of launch,” she says.

Bettter was due to launch its latest drop on the day war broke out. It never happened. “We were all basically volunteering, there was nothing else you could do,” Pelipas recalls. In the weeks that followed, having evacuated her team from Kyiv and escaped to Paris, the 38-year-old began mobilising her personal network, launching Bettter Community, an open-source database of Ukrainian creatives.

In June, Bettter Community joined forces with a similar enterprise, Given Name, while Pelipas turned her focus to relocating the majority of her 30-strong Bettter team to Portugal. At the end of June, she shot the latest campaign in Kyiv with a local team. “A lot of professionals are stuck here with no work and they are depressed. It felt so fantastic,” she says.

There is a renewed spirit of togetherness and pride in continuing to manufacture where possible in Ukraine. A group chat of some 60 designers set up after war broke out has become a valuable resource for sharing contacts, logistics solutions and inspiration. “Before, we were competitors. Now, we are friends,” says Schnaider, who is part of the group. Sleeper’s Kate Zubarieva agrees: “We have a strong design community in Kyiv, it has something in common with Antwerp. We feel that we can help our country because we are making business in Ukraine and we still pay taxes. It makes you feel strong.”

Others are looking to the past with a wry smile in order to advance. Recent Central Saint Martins graduate Masha Popova, 31, is embracing the blingy Y2K trend that dominated the early 2000s, in contrast to those designers whose artistic vision was forged a decade ago in opposition to the flashy post-Soviet aesthetic of the country’s newly minted millionaires. Inspired by the “eclectic” style mash-up of her teenage years, where “you either got fake Dolce & Gabbana jeans with crystals, or you bought things second-hand”, the Podilsk-born designer’s fledgling label took off when Dua Lipa wore one of her butterfly-motif bodices. “It’s important for me that you feel sexy when you wear my clothes, but not in an elegant, seductive way — more careless,” says Popova.

With a looming global recession, the overall outlook is stormy. As Julie Gilhart points out, “Growing a brand is an uphill battle, without the backdrop of war.” But grim determination has helped this remarkable cohort of designers to succeed in the past. “When you think about the fall of the Roman empire, Putin is not a big deal,” says Sleeper’s Kate Zubarieva. “What I hope is that values of democracy, of human rights, will win.” And when they do? “I hope one day we can make a beautiful dinner in Kyiv and invite all our friends and supporters,” says Zubarieva. “Every day, we are getting closer.”