Joining the Ukrainian Fashion Week for the first time, SYNDICATE presented a new collection exploring memory, time, and the constant transformation of objects and meanings. At its core is a question of what fades with time and what we consciously choose to preserve. Personal memory expands into collective experience, the old encounters the new, and the boundary between the authentic and the reconstructed gradually begins to dissolve.

The collection began with the family archive of the brand’s designer Iryna Vasylevska: photographs of her parents, objects from her childhood, and ordinary household belongings that have survived for decades and, over time, become personal artefacts. These memories are joined by observations of the wardrobes of older generations of men — clothes worn for years, unexpected colour combinations, and a particular visual language that emerges entirely outside the pursuit of fashion.

From these intimate references, SYNDICATE moves towards the broader subject of collective memory and its fragility. Ukraine is undergoing profound transformation, and we are changing with it. Within this reality, the question of how we preserve the memory of people, events, and experiences taking place today becomes increasingly urgent — especially when what feels vivid now may eventually shift, fade, or disappear, but should not be forgotten.

This dialogue between past and present is embedded in the collection’s materials and techniques. Traditional, at times almost archaic methods of treating fabric coexist with contemporary technologies, while handwork meets digital processes. Indigo is placed alongside heat-transfer techniques and experimental materials. Imprints made from real flowers are digitised, altered, and transferred back onto fabric, returning in an entirely new form.The tension between the real and the artificial runs throughout the collection. Physical objects become images; one material takes on the appearance of another; familiar things are transformed until their original source is difficult to identify. Memory works in much the same way: what we experience as an exact recollection may, over time, become a reconstruction — an image repeatedly reshaped by our own minds.

Water becomes one of the collection’s recurring motifs: the sea remembered from childhood, rain, a river. Rather than carrying a single fixed meaning, it acts as a force that can preserve traces, distort them, wash them away, and create something new in their place. In the final part of the show, this idea takes physical form as water interacts directly with the garments and a water-soluble material. Transformation and disappearance are no longer simply themes of the collection, but unfold in real time as part of the performance.

The scenography extends this exploration of authenticity and imitation. Within a Kyiv space, SYNDICATE constructs its own interpretation of an Asian street, informed by Vasylevska’s travels through Japan and other parts of Asia. Rather than functioning as a backdrop, the setting becomes another layer of the collection’s logic: a real place reconstructed through memory and translated into an entirely different context.

The show ultimately becomes an extension of the collection itself. Past meets present, the physical meets the digital, the authentic meets its reconstruction, and personal memory becomes intertwined with the collective. Nothing remains entirely fixed. Things change, some inevitably disappear, yet even after they are gone, they leave a trace.

Show partners:

Aromateque Concept Store

BORNTOSTANDOUT® fragrance house

KEVIN.MURPHY — hair partner