Fashion shows rarely start with a moment of silence, but that’s what Ukrainian designer Svitlana Bevza did Tuesday night for her country to condemn the Russian invasion.
She further presented a rich collection of patriotic symbols.
Bevza is an old hand at New York Fashion Week, where she has shown since 2017. She is based in Kiev and has her workshops there, but was forced to leave after the invasion at the end of February, and the explosions and his endless sirens, to protect him. two children.
Her husband Volodymyr Omelyan, a politician who was a government minister from 2016 to 2019, stayed at home to fight. You can see her on her Instagram account wearing military fatigues and holding a gun, AFP reported.
Bevza’s spring-summer collection, titled “Fragile Motherland” and unveiled in a building on Wall Street, was very political. The blue and yellow flag of Ukraine was projected onto a wall.
“Some people probably don’t understand that this is true. And today is the 202nd day of the war in Ukraine. And there are thousands of people dead,” she told AFP.
“I was forced to leave the country with my children. And my husband is at war,” she added.
She introduced blouses that are sensual when worn with skirts or pants, but still reminiscent of bulletproof vests. Some look like shields that expose the shoulders and navel.
Grains of wheat — symbols of fertile Ukraine as a breadbasket for the world — have a narrative flow through the collection. A Bevza necklace depicts them, burned to black, because “a lot of wheat was burned by the Russians,” she said.
The voluminous cut of some of her skirts also recalls the fit of Ukrainian farm women harvesting wheat.
“There is a deep sacred meaning to bread and wheat itself that came down through the centuries,” she said, pointing to the 1930s famine blamed on Stalin.
“What we protect now, we protect the fertile lands. And what we are basically fighting for is to live free, to live in peace on our land,” said the designer.
