500 Shirts. 500 Destinies. 500 Voices Speaking Across Time.

At Ukrainian Fashion Week, the Mystetskyi Arsenal unveiled embroidered shirts from the unique archive of Khrystyna Rachytska — presented to the public for the very first time.

This archive is not merely a collection — for the designer, it is an inexhaustible source of inspiration, a wellspring of both creativity and life itself.

What began almost two decades ago as an instinctive search for embroidery and traditional cuts gradually transformed into a lifelong passion, and ultimately, into a mission: to save us, Ukrainians, from forgetting.

Today, the collection holds nearly 500 embroidered shirts — 500 living testaments of our existence, continuity, and artistry, woven through centuries. Each shirt is a rescued masterpiece. Each is part of the cultural DNA of the Ukrainian nation.

An embroidered shirt, created by a woman of the distant past, now emerges not only as an artifact for admiration or study but as an embodiment of memory. In every stitch — beauty and love. In every pattern — the structures of language. These shirts can be “read” as personal stories of women who once lived, loved, sang, worked, created, and left themselves to us as a legacy.

500 shirts are 500 stories of life. Of a girl, a young woman, a mother. Of her joy and her tears, her dreams and triumphs, her pain and her strength. Each shirt is more than fabric — it is a soul. The people who once wore them are long gone, but the shirts remain alive, resonating with their voices. Each is a self-sufficient work of high artistry, carrying within it mastery, vision, and the eternal will to preserve tradition.

These 500 individual memories intertwine like threads, weaving together the shared fabric of a nation’s memory — animated by a common spirit.

The shirts presented at the exhibition are but a fraction of the archive, yet they form a powerful call to return — to ourselves, to our lineage. How much life these garments have seen, how long they have waited for this moment — to meet you, to pass on their strength, and to whisper across time:

“You exist. We exist. I exist.”