Vyshyvanka Day, 16 May 2013
A greeting for the day, and a note on the shirt as a piece of engineering rather than decoration.
A good Vyshyvanka Day to everyone wearing one today.
Having spent a certain amount of my working life around manufacturing, what I notice about a traditional shirt is the construction. It is cut from rectangles, with almost no curved seams and almost no waste — a length of woven linen turned into a garment with the minimum number of cuts.
That is not a stylistic choice. It is what you do when cloth is expensive because someone in the house wove it, and it produces a garment that can be repaired, lengthened and passed on.
The embroidery sits on top of a piece of extremely efficient engineering, and the engineering is the part nobody photographs.
A good day to you.
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