Ukrainian Fashion Week

The start of UFW International Season SS23

The start of UFW International Season SS23

On July 22, the first show was held within the “Support Ukrainian Fashion” Initiative. Ukrainian designer NADYA DZYAK presented Seasonless Collection 2022 at Malta Fashion Week.

The Ukrainian Fashion Week is sincerely grateful to our colleagues from Malta Fashion Week for the big support in this terrible and tragic time. Today, every company and every person in the world makes a personal choice. The support of the Ukrainian fashion industry, which was carried out by Malta Fashion Week, is invaluable at a time when the world is choosing between good and evil, between light and darkness.

“I am personally thankful to Adrian J. Mizzi, founder and executive producer of Malta Fashion Week, for inviting talented Ukrainian designer NADYA DZYAK. Thank you for the excellent organization of the show. I am grateful that the 51st season of Ukrainian Fashion Week, which cannot be held in Ukraine now, opened with a show at Malta Fashion Week. Malta was the first to hold a show by a designer from Ukraine as part of the Support Ukrainian Fashion Initiative and we will always be grateful for this support”, – Iryna Danylevska, founder and CEO of Ukrainian Fashion Week.

Ukrainian designer Nadya Dzyak about the collection:

“Perhaps, this is my most difficult and most important collection in life.
I started working on it back in November of last year. Everything in the air was permeated with a foreboding of war, which we could not believe to the last. But I already felt something – the collection was completely black.
One day in December, I looked around and realized that all my favourite details: pleats, frills, transparent textures, everything I love to work with were all black.
I have always loved bright colours and light, and all my collections had a lot of them. The play of rays and bright shades inspired me. And there is one blackness…
It reflected the state of my soul.
We were sewing the collection, and then February 24th came… and that was it.
On the last day, when I was in our studio, I saw my team – we were like one friendly family and for many years we created incredible things together.

And then this terrible war took it all away from me. Took away the opportunity to create, separated me from my girls and scattered us around the world. On my sofa in the studio, pieces of fabric, samples of pleats and frills remained, as if frozen…
However, I promised myself that no matter what, we must create and finish this collection to fight the darkness.

Therefore, my dear girls who remained in Ukraine, my heroines returned to work and continued to work on the collection, and I was online with them from Vienna. I looked at them through the phone screen, at my studio and cried… Because my soul is there, in Ukraine, but physically I am not with them.
Some of the fabrics were sent to Vienna and I sewed some things myself, as I used to sew my own dresses at university.

There are always many different textures in our collections, I prefer the combination of transparent organza with dense textures, it’s like a play of contradictions – light and dark. I also like the deformation of fabric pleats and making geometric patterns out of them.

For many years, we have been cooperating with a company from Kharkiv that manufactures pleats for us. There is an extremely difficult situation there now, and yet, being under constant fire, they made our signature pleat. Part of this collection was created from it. It is priceless and confirms our strength and resilience

Malta Fashion Week 2022 is organized by Adrian J. Mizzi with the support of the Valletta Cultural Agency under the Ministry of National Heritage, Arts and Local Government and the Malta Tourism Authority.

Photo: Steven Muliett

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