What was the Mantua? How a 17th-century Gown Transformed Dressmaking and Ushered in Financial Freedom for Women

Diego Velázquez, Portrait of the Infanta Maria Theresa of Spain, 1653, an early version of the mantua

By Sarah Bendall

If you’ve watched many period dramas, you’ve probably seen a mantua before. Originating in France in the 1670s, this women’s garment consisted of lengths of t-shaped fabric that were pleated to create an unstiffened bodice with attached overskirts.

This gown was worn over a pair of stays (corset) and an often contrasting petticoat. The draping and folding of fabric created a front-opening gown.

What many people don’t realise, however, is how fundamentally this item of clothing altered women’s involvement in the fashion industry – and represented a ticket to financial freedom for an industry of female mantua makers.

The robe à la française was a mantua style that featured loose back pleats that draped to the floor. The Met/Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Bequest, 1954

What was the mantua?

After its invention in the 1670s, the new gown became immediately popular among fashionable Parisian women.

Although strict dress codes at the Versailles court of French King Louis XIV prohibited the wearing of mantuas, women at the English court helped popularise it in England.

By the 1680s, the mantua was widely worn in Western and Central Europe, as well as in European colonies around the world. It soon became the basis for all women’s gowns in the 18th century.

Popular versions of the mantua in 18th century included:

• the loose style called a robe volante

• the iconic robe à la française (sometimes called a sack gown) with its back pleats that draped to the floor, and

• the tighter fitting robe à la anglaise  (also known as English or Italian gowns).

The robe à l’anglaise had fitted back pleats and was tighter compared to its French counterpart. The Met/Purchase, Irene Lewisohn Bequest, 2018

Tailors vs mantua makers

As well as changing the look of western fashions, the mantua radically changed women’s involvement in the fashion industry.

Before the 17th century, outer garments were usually made by male tailors. Apprenticeships and membership of guilds – the organisations that controlled most craft trades – were restricted to boys and men.

Women did participate informally in these professions. They sometimes worked alongside tailor family members (and some were fined for doing so) and widows were permitted to carry on the businesses of their deceased husbands.

Women had also historically worked as seamstresses or “silkwomen” making small linen or silk goods like underwear and accessories.

This loose 1730s style was called a robe volante. The Met/Purchase, Friends of The Costume Institute Gifts, 2010

However, this began to change in the late 17th century during what came to be known as the consumer revolution – a period, beginning in the 1600s, that saw a significant jump in the consumption of luxury goods.

Significantly, in 1675, women in Paris and Rouen acquired their own, independent couturière (dressmaking) guilds and began to take over making women’s clothing from male tailors.

In London, guilds with dwindling memberships also began to permit paying female members.

Due to the considerable influence of France on western fashions, women in London began to train under French dressmakers, giving rise to what were known in English as mantua makers.

Dressmaking and financial freedom

From the 18th to 20th centuries, dressmaking and other fashion or textile-related industries were the main source of formal employment for women in Britain, Australia and the United States (alongside teaching and domestic service).

New training opportunities in dressmaking – coupled with historical peculiarities such as London’s feme sole status, which allowed married women to run businesses and have finances independent of their husbands – meant many women began to open their own businesses.

Single women often lived in houses with other mantua makers and their apprentices, working as teams. Married women usually operated in workshops in the family home alongside their husbands, many of whom worked as tailors.

By the mid-18th century, manuals instructing parents on craft apprenticeships for their children noted mantua making was a large trade

reckoned a genteel, as well as profitable Employ [for women], many of them living well and saving Money.

But several male tailoring guilds in Europe attempted to stop women working as mantua makers, claiming they were taking away their business. Additionally, many women who worked in the garment-making industries were poorly paid and often worked in cramped conditions.

Mantuas were sometimes pinned up at the back like this 1690s example. The Met/Rogers Fund, 1933

Yet, many did rise above. French mantua makers were particularly popular, with women in London paying substantially more for gowns made by French women with access to the latest fashion knowledge in Paris.

Some became confidants of queens. The famous fashion merchant Marie-Jeanne “Rose” Bertin designed many of French queen Marie Antoinette’s gowns (her detractors labelled her the queen’s “minister of fashion”).

These networks gave these women access to vast amounts of clients and social capital. By the 19th century, senior dressmakers and milliners called modistes often ran their own luxury fashion houses in the West End of London.

Mantua making was also a significant business opportunity for women in Australia.

“M. Hayes”, Catherine Mellon and Martha Matthews were all “mantua makers and milliners” who advertised their services in the early years of the Sydney colony.

Legacies of mantua makers

During the early years of the 19th century, mantuas fell out of use as new styles appeared. The term “dressmaker” also came to slowly replace the term “mantua maker”.

However, the gendered segregation of labour remained. During much of the 19th and 20th centuries, men were more likely to be tailors and have their clothing made by tailors. Women were more likely to be dressmakers and have their clothing made by dressmakers. The skills and techniques of each profession remained quite different.

With the advent of modern fast fashion, the skills of both tailors and dressmakers are fast being lost, and with it the knowledge of this revolutionary trade for women.

Sarah Bendall, Research Fellow, Gender and Women's History Research Centre, Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Australian Catholic University

TRAVEL: A River Runs Through It: Echuca Dreaming on the Mighty Murray

Alfred Maslen's paddle steamer the PS Adelaide is still plowing through the waters of the Murray River today, after more than 150 years of service on Australia's greatest waterway. Cover picture of the Port of Echuca. See historic images below

Victoria's port town of Echuca on the Murray River has a rich history with its paddle steamers and riverboat men who travelled through vast inland areas of Australia. For a century, they transported wheat and wool and brought news, groceries and cloth to the people living in distant river country. Australia's Mississippi, the mighty Murray winds its way for thousands of kilometres from the soaring Mount Kosciuszko ranges down to the South Australian coast. Writer Geoffrey Maslen recalls his childhood days riding the river with his father, a steamboat engineer on the PS Adelaide

 

Morning mist rising from the Murray River
as a paddle steamer chuffs along

IN early winter the Murray River is low. Daily the mud-banks on each side appear to move together as if trying to staunch the river’s flow. The water is still fast-moving but without the broad, graceful sweep it has in spring and summer. Its colour, too, is different – a sombre grey, unlike the cheerful brown-green of the warmer months. As the morning sun drives back the shadows of the gum trees lining the banks, a white mist hovers over the waters. Seen from the top of a clay cliff bank, the mist winds away before me, slowly melting in the faint warmth. Below, at the water’s edge, a white egret perches on one leg eyeing its image – a long, pale question mark – in the water’s sheen. A flock of sulphur-crested cockatoos screeches like winged lunatics in the trees on the opposite bank. They suddenly take to the air and in an instant are gone. The brief silence is broken when a fat yellow-belly leaps out of the water and plops loudly back beneath the swirling waters – one of the many fish species that draw thousands of fishermen each year. A carolling magpie calls melodiously and a black-winged currawong sings a reply. Life is abundant around and in the river. For the creatures that rely on it, the river is life...

  

The Murray once echoed to the shrill whistles of a hundred trading paddle steamers, puffing thousands of kilometres with passengers and cargo ~ long before railways and motor cars and aeroplanes ~ through country Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. The men on the steamers opened up a vast area of inland Australia, feeding and clothing the people living in the river country and carrying away their produce. They were also the floating mailmen and newsboys, spreading friendly gossip and even at times the word of the Lord. The overlanders who travelled by horse and dray, the steamboat men and the pioneer settlers regarded the river in different ways: for some the water was for crops and stock; for others, it was a great transport highway. The gums they saw as fence posts, firewood, boats or railway sleepers, the cliffs as quarries.

 

The steamboat men opened up vast areas of inland Australia, bringing food and clothing to the people living in the river country and carrying away their produce

 

Built in 1866, the PS Adelaide is still plying
 the river today, carrying passengers

In my childhood, my father Alfred Maslen was the engineer on the oldest paddle steamer then left on the Murray, the PS Adelaide whose age has now passed the century and a half mark. She is a sturdy old tub, no beauty to be sure with her squat lines and snub nose. But she has a certain rakish grace, sailing the river like some outsize, mechanical duck. As with most of the riverboats, the Adelaide was built to last in 1866. She was originally fitted out to accommodate passengers on the run from Echuca to Albury but in 1873 she was refitted as logging steamer and for nearly 100 years she pulled barges of cargo – red gum logs in her later years – up and down the river to Echuca. I can see her now, chuffing her way upstream towing a string of barges behind to collect logs from the Barmah forest. The barges were outriggers with a number of logs lashed crosswise and from these the red gum logs, too heavy to float, were suspended by chains on the surface of the water, parallel to the barge.

 

 Curled up in the paddle steamer's bunk house I could look up into the sky, stars glittering like tiny crystals while meteoric sparks from the boat's belching tunnel flamed momentarily beneath them

 

A small boy with the Riverboat Captain,
 at the big wheel of his paddle steamer

On special occasions I was allowed to go too ~ a week on the high road! Bliss for a small boy was the marvel of the two great thrusting pistons, the hiss of steam, the steady, hypnotic chunka-plunk-chunk of the paddles. During the day there was ever-changing scenery ~ red gum forests, high cliffs, sand bars ~ with occasional stops at the wood piles to load up with firewood. And there was wildlife galore: ducks of every kind, huge flocks of swans, innumerable species of other birds and sometimes a long tiger snake, its head up like a periscope, swimming like mad to escape the whack of the paddles. At night the great eyes of the headlamps would sweep the bends and stare along the reaches into the weird and silent darkness of the bush. Yellow water curled at the bow and the trees grew out of the darkness, flashed greenly for a moment, then sank back into the shadow. Curled up in the bunk house with the door open I could look out and up into the infinite depths of sky, stars glittering like tiny crystals while meteoric sparks from the belching tunnel flamed momentarily beneath them. As I was lulled to sleep by the steady throb of the engine I could hear the sound of the firebox doors being clanged open, the rattle of the long poker as it was wielded to rearrange the burning logs. As a new log was thrust in, the glow from the furnace would light up the trees along the bank. Then the firebox doors would clang shut and I would hear the sound of laughter and soft talk from some of the crew keeping the captain company in the wheelhouse.

From the barge behind a song would sometimes drift across the water. One was sung to the tune of The Dying Stockman: Wrap me up in my tow-line and check-line And scuttle me deep down below, Where the cod and the snags won’t molest me, Where the Murray’s clear waters do flow... But usually it was yarns that were spun; oft-repeated tales of the great days on the river and the mighty mud pirates who sailed her. There was Captain Tommy Freeman who, as a young man was inspired by the feats of Blondin and walked across the Murray high on a tightrope stretched between trees on opposite banks. When he reached the middle of the river, the Echuca Riverine Herald reported, he lay down on his back and `kicked his legs about in the most astonishing manner’.

As I was lulled to sleep by the steady throb of the engine I could hear the sound of the firebox doors being clanged open, the rattle of the long poker as it was wielded to rearrange the burning logs
 

Paddle steamers leaving the wharves
at the Port of Echuca

Tommy was one of the best swimmers among the river men. One of his favourite pastimes was to dive in ahead of one of the paddle wheels of his steamer, let the thrashing blades pass over his head and then surface and swim to the rudder where he would climb on board again. His enemies called him `Tear-arse Tommy’ because he was always trying to get the maximum speed out of boats. Once, when sailing full-steam up the Darling, Tommy pointed to a camp high on the bank to his son Buck, who was the mate.

The camper was sitting outside his tent eating breakfast. `Watch this,” Tommy said and steered the steamer straight at the bank. At the last moment, he veered away but a great wave swept up the bank and over the unsuspecting breakfaster. The furious victim, however, was waiting at the next bend with a shotgun and peppered the wheelhouse with buck-shot. The captain and mate lay on the floor arguing about who should take the wheel while the steamer rounded the bend with no-one in command until she was out of range.

The firebox doors would clang shut and I would hear the sound of laughter and soft talk from the crew keeping the captain company in the wheelhouse

Then there was Wildman Bailey, another river captain from Echuca who acted for years as if the river was his private domain. Once, sailing in the Success with a barge called Croupier, Bailey met another steamer and was supposed to but refused to give way. The two boats steamed straight at each other and missed narrowly. Bailey managed to swing away from the other boat but a collision between it and the Croupier seemed inevitable. Bailey watched helplessly as the other steamer and his barge rushed head-on at each other. `Goodbye Croupier old girl,’ he called sadly.



The PS Adelaide docked in the rising sun at Echuca

But instead, the steamer crawled up on the Croupier on one paddle wheel, waddled the full length of her deck and then slid into the river again, leaving the barge barely damaged. On another occasion, Bailey was caught up the Darling on a falling river. Flying downstream on the last of the water, he passed a sheep station just before dawn and was hailed by an anxious squatter in his pyjamas. `Hey Bailey!’ the squatter yelled, `will you take my wool? It might be another year before the river rises again.’ Bailey leaned out of the wheelhouse and stared up at the squatter. `She’s so damn near sliding on the bottom,’ he yelled back, `that I wouldn’t even take a loaf of bread – and by hell am I hungry!’

 

Today, a dozen large and small home-built boats still chuff along the river, including the Alexander Arbuthnot ~ one of the last steamers built on the Murray River during the riverboat trade. She was constructed at Koondrook in 1923 to tow barges carrying logs from the forest to the Arbuthnot Sawmills for some years until the 1940s. Then she was sold to charcoal producers in the Barmah Forest and, during World War II, she lay idle. In 1947, however, she sank at her mooring and it was not until 1972, that the boat was raised by a group of Shepparton volunteers and was then bought by the City of Echuca in 1989 for restoration at the Port. The Alexander Arbuthnot is one of the 10 or more steamers that can still be seen on the river around Echuca.

 

Today, a dozen boats still chuff along the river, including the Alexander Arbuthnot ~ one of the last steamers built on the Murray River during the riverboat trade

 

The great sweep of the Murray River runs
through four Australian states

As it snakes its way across the countryside, the Murray drains an enormous area of land. The Murray-Darling Basin occupies more than a million square kilometres ~ about a seventh of the total area of Australia. With tributaries like the Darling, the Murrumbidgee, the Goulburn and the Campaspe, the Murray River takes in half of Victoria, three-quarters of New South Wales and part of South Australia, and an area of Queensland greater than the whole of Victoria. Maybe the Murray isn't as famous as other great rivers such as the Mississippi or the Amazon but, from its watershed in the Mount Kosciusko ranges more than 2000 metres above sea level, the Murray has wound its way for 20 million years ~ far longer than any other river on Earth ~ down to the South Australian coast 3000 kilometres away.

Humans have known and lived by the Murray for more than 40,000 years: the first people had it to themselves for almost all that time, up until 1830 when Captain Charles Sturt rowed down to its mouth: “At 3 pm, Hopkinson called out that we were approaching a junction and in less than a minute afterwards we were hurried into a broad and noble river,” was how the soldier-navigator-explorer described his discovery. “We had got on the high road and it was either to the south coast or to some important outlet but I will call it the Murray River.”

River trade endured for a century along the Murray River. By 1863, Echuca had been built to take the loads of wool, wheat and meat from the steam boats because it was the closest river port to Melbourne.

 The wharves at Echuca where wool and wheat
were unloaded for Melbourne

Some 20 years later, William Randall steamed from Mannum in South Australia nearly 1600 kilometres past Swan Hill ~ downstream from Echuca ~ in a home-made boat with a home-made steam engine whose boiler `swelled in defiance of bolts changes and wedges’, breathing, say the old-timers, like a concertina. Sturt’s `high road’ soon became a reality. River trade endured for a century and stretched across three colonies and 6000 kilometres of waterway. In 1860, 17 steam boats were trading and operating along the Murray River and by1863 the new town of Echuca had been built to take the loads of wool and wheat and meat from the steam boats because it was the closest river port to Melbourne. By then, it had a population of 300 but, in less than 10 years, there were 1,600 inhabitants and Echuca was Victoria's second largest port with 240 boats annually trading in all types of goods, particularly wool.

The PS Emmylou, one of the fine 19th Century
paddle steamers travelling the river

Just before the turn of the 20th century, however, railway lines began linking river towns with the larger cities and the steamboat era was already nearing its end. Eventually, boats were tied up all along the Murray River waiting for work that never came. Some sank or were broken up, a few ran halfway into the new century as fishing boats, logging steamers and passenger craft but they, too, eventually disappeared. But then interest spread among locals and historians and some of the old steamboats were restored and began operating trips up and down the river for tourists.

The Aborigines had looked at the river and saw fish and game; at the gums and saw canoes and shields; at the cliffs and saw caves for shelter, clay and ochre for dancing bodies. But there was a difference. To the Aboriginal tribes ~ the Baraba Baraba, Wemba Wemba, Yorta Yorta and Ngurraiilam ~ the river was sacred. It was not theirs; it did not belong to them. They belonged to it for the river was the source of their legends; for them the Murray valley had been carved out in the Dreamtime when a giant Murray cod went swimming down the piccaninny Murray, his waving tail so huge it created the great broad sweeps seen today.

To the Aboriginal tribes ~ the Baraba Baraba, Wemba Wemba, Yorta Yorta and Ngurraiilam ~ the river was sacred. It was not theirs; it did not belong to them. They belonged to it, for the Murray was the source of their legends

A white Egret on the Murray, one of the many native
Australian birds that make the river home

In their 40,000 or more years as custodians, the Aborigines left few scars around the river: sacred burial grounds, gum trees with bark cut out for canoes, smoke stains on the yellow cliffs where they camped; glittering kitchen middens of cockles and mussel shells. The marks of the European invaders, though, are more easily seen. Locks and dams have drowned the swamplands and the red gum forests, arresting the rhythm of the river which replenished the swamps and mud-flats and generated the breeding cycles for fish, and for crops and cattle, the river polluted with runoffs and drains. There are other changes: When I first learned to swim in the Murray’s warm brown water, paddle-wheelers still swished back and forth. Swimming like fish, we could easily dodge them and we chased their wash to catch the waves, bobbing like corks.

Today, though, swimming in the river is like playing hop-scotch on a busy freeway. High-powered speedboats roar down the river, trailing skiers for tails, scattering swimmers daring enough to try to compete or just to cross the river from one bank to the other. A screaming fibreglass rocket with a 60 horsepower outboard at the stern and a nut at the wheel has none of the charm, the serenity or even the style of the old river boats.

The memories flood back as I stand on the cliff looking down on the river, the white mist almost gone. Life along the river has experienced a vast change in the past 150 or more years. The indigenous people who roamed its banks for millennia have almost all disappeared. The inland sailors, too, have gone ~ Alf Maslen among them ~ and little of what they brought to the river remains. They have stepped out of the great river of history.

Geoffrey Maslen’s new books are An Uncertain Future: Australian birdlife in danger and Too late: How we lost the battle with climate change, are published by HardieGrant and available at all good bookshops.

An early picture of the Adelaide steaming up the Murray River, towing a barge carrying red-gum logs. Photograph: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society



In 1869, wool being unloaded at the Punt in Echuca. Photograph: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society.

Bullock trains in Leslie Street in Echuca, carrying the wool brought by the paddles steamers to be taken to Melbourne. Photograph: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society 

 

 An 1876 etching of Echuca's Main Street and the Bridge Hotel at left, both still key features of the town. Image: Courtesy of the Echuca Historical Society

Turning the Fabric of Fashion Inside Out: Lilia Litkovska Brings Ukrainian Avant-Garde Art, Exposed Construction and the Power of Reinvention into Focus

A vividly hued new creation by designer Lilia Litkovska in Paris. Photograph (above) and cover picture by Brittany Scott for DAM.

We look back at one of the highlights of Paris Fashion Week, Spring/Summer 2027, the Ukrainian designer Lilia Litkovska's new collection which challenges the conventions of dressing with avant-garde art, experimental tailoring and adaptable silhouettes. Inspired by artist Borys Kosarev, she exposes the beauty of construction while reflecting on the realities of war and the enduring power of creativity to transform how we see ourselves and the world. Story by Isabella Lancellotti. Feature photography by Brittany Scott 

One of the intriguing transformative

designs presented in Paris. 

Photograph: Brittany Scott

LILIA Litkovska presented her Stricha collection at Café Beaubourg, facing the Centre Pompidou in Paris.  The show brought Ukrainian artistic heritage into dialogue with the city's creative culture, while asking an intriguing question: who decides what a garment is supposed to be?

The designer explored the relationship between appearance and identity through experimental tailoring, fragmented imagery and garments designed to be worn in more than one way. A blouse could become a dress, a cape transforms into a coat, and seams that most designers would conceal become integral to the design.

Café Beaubourg, a place for conversation opposite one of Paris's principal centres of contemporary art, provided a fitting backdrop for a collection concerned with the unexpected connections between people, cultures and ideas.

The title comes from a dialect of Ukraine's Hutsul region, where stricha means a meeting or encounter. Litkovska describes the small but significant moments in which we first see one another, before appearances give way to a deeper understanding. “Everything begins with a meeting. Before words, before names, a glance, a gesture, a way of standing in a room.”

It is an idea that translates naturally into fashion, where the first impression is often visual, formed through silhouette, texture and the way a person inhabits their clothes. But Litkovska is interested in what happens after that initial encounter, when familiar appearances begin to shift. 

The artistic reference point was Borys Kosarev, one of the founding figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde

Voluminous proportions and adaptable 

pieces made for an experimental yet 

very wearable collection.

Photograph: Brittany Scott 

The artistic reference point was Borys Kosarev, one of the founding figures of the Ukrainian avant-garde. His experimental portraits and masks fragmented the human face into geometric planes, challenging the notion that identity could be captured through a single, coherent image. 

Litkovska translated this visual language into garments through prints, appliqué and collage, incorporating angular compositions into a collection already preoccupied with the possibilities of breaking things apart and putting them together differently.

Rather than simply reproducing Kosarev's artwork, she adopted his experimental approach. Traditional Ukrainian homespun textiles were turned inside out, while seams and construction details were deliberately exposed. 

Familiar silhouettes were similarly reconfigured: voluminous blouses extended into long dresses, and capes assumed the proportions of coats. The clothes revealed their own construction instead of presenting an immaculate exterior, giving the collection a graphic, architectural quality without sacrificing its sense of movement.

“I believe the construction is more honest than the silhouette,” Litkovska explains. “The seam, the cut, the place where two pieces meet and strain against each other. I do not want to conceal these. I want them spoken aloud, made part of the garment's own language.”

It is a compelling distinction. In luxury fashion, where craftsmanship is frequently celebrated through painstakingly perfected surfaces, Litkovska directs attention to the process itself. The visible seam becomes evidence of how a garment has been assembled, while its exposed interior suggests that what is usually hidden may be just as interesting as what is presented to the world.

Shaped by four generations of tailoring, Litkovska combines traditional craftsmanship with a willingness to challenge its conventions. 

Lilia Litkovska combines fine tailoring 

with an avant-garde sensibility.

Photograph: Brittany Scott

This approach has been central to the designer since the label was founded in Kyiv in 2009. Shaped by four generations of tailoring and garment-making in her family, Litkovska combines an understanding of traditional craftsmanship with a willingness to challenge its conventions. 

Her guiding principle, “there is no wrong side”, is not merely a slogan but a practical design philosophy: pieces can be reversed, deconstructed and restructured, inviting the wearer to discover alternative ways of using them.

The concept extends to the smallest detail. Each garment leaves the atelier with its label covered by a strip of white fabric, symbolically leaving space for the next chapter to be written by its owner. As the designer explains:

“Once a garment leaves the atelier, it is no longer entirely ours. It enters someone else's life, body, and imagination. We invite the person who wears it to become its co-author, to give it a new interpretation, to transform it through their own gestures, and ultimately to decide what the garment can become.”

This notion of shared authorship offers an alternative to fashion's familiar emphasis on designer signatures and prescribed styling. Rather than dictating a finished image, Litkovska provides the framework for personal interpretation. The wearer becomes an active participant in the creative process, bringing individual experience and imagination to the garment.

Since joining the official Paris Fashion Week calendar in 2017, the designer has developed an international presence while maintaining a strong connection to her Ukrainian origins. That connection carries particular significance in this collection, where the exploration of what remains essential takes place against the reality of war.

“During the war, a person does not simply survive, there is still a choice, again and again, to want, to love, to create, to open a door to someone new”

On the runway at the Cafe Beaubourg,

the models walked between the tables.

Photograph: Brittany Scott

At the Paris show, the words “SET MISSING. DESTROYED BY MISSILE” were above the runway. They introduced an abrupt and devastating reminder of the destruction confronting Ukraine. They are difficult to reconcile with the beauty and ingenuity of fashion, and that is precisely the point. Litkovska refuses to separate her creative practice from the circumstances in which it exists.

“Perhaps this is what life in Ukraine has taught me, more than anything else could have,” she says. “When the ground itself is uncertain, you stop mistaking decoration for substance. You learn, with a clarity that almost hurts, what is truly yours and, from everything you own, what is worth carrying into whatever comes next.”

The collection's message is therefore more nuanced than a simple celebration of resilience. It concerns the decision to remain receptive to life, even when circumstances encourage withdrawal: “During the war, a person does not simply survive, there is still a choice, again and again, to want, to love, to create, to open a door to someone new.”

That spirit informs the collection's broader vision. Through her Kyiv flagship, Litkovska Basecamp, the designer also supports a cultural programme of exhibitions, encounters and dialogue, extending her interest in the meeting of ideas beyond the runway. Fashion, in this context, is part of a larger conversation about how people express themselves, preserve their histories and imagine what comes next.

With Stricha, Litkovska brings these concerns together through clothes that are technically considered yet deliberately open-ended. The collection's most interesting proposition is that transformation need not mean abandoning what came before. Sometimes, it requires only a different perspective and the freedom to turn something inside out and perhaps discover what was there all along.

See the full collection from the Litkovska Spring/Summer 2027 Paris show