Sarakatsani Inspiration

This post is a follow up to yesterday's second piece, the one about John Gillow.

Inspired by his work, I went to check out some of the pieces exhibited at the British Museum to ponder a bit about how we can reincorporate certain elements of traditional dresses into contemporary fashion designs.

As you may imagine the choice is extremely wide and the British Museum has got some beautifil costumes that can be used as inspiration.

I was particularly intrigued by this traditional dress worn by the Sarakatsani people in the Balkans.

The Sarakatsani are a nomadic population mainly living between Greece, Southern Bulgaria and Macedonia.

Patrick Leigh Fermor described their costume in his volume Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece, as “the heavy and unwieldy clothes that moved with the stiffness of armour. Aprons hung to knee-length as stiffly as stoles and nothing bore any relationship to conventional ideas of human shape.”

The costume is made with locally spun wool and linen and it features a pleated skirt, low slung apron, wide cummerbund and two waistcoats covered in embroidery made of wool and worn over a long chemise or shift dress with embroidered sleeves.

Armlets, leggings and a bag complete the outfit.

The lower part of the costume is covered in zig zag patterns designed to ward off the evil spirits, black braids infilled with thread covered in gold and silver-coloured metal stripes and white and yellow damask ribbon stripes.

The copper alloy clasp comes from Southern Bulgaria where the Saraksani are known as karakachani.

A wide goffered or crocheted circular collar (quite beautiful in its simplicity – View this photo) ending at the shoulders in scallops completes the look.

What I found really striking about this outfit is that it incorporates different techniques – embroidery, pleating, crocheting and so on – each of them equally distinctive from both a design and a tailoring point of view.

So, who said that traditional costumes aren't inspiring?

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