With her collection titled “Zhnyva,” meaning “harvest,” Lilia Litkovska looked at her 15-year-old brand’s achievements and celebrated evolution and renewal. “It’s not just nature’s harvest, it’s my personal harvest as well that I would like to share with everyone,” she explained during her packed out presentation.
Her vocabulary was deeply informed by the importance of the Earth in her homeland, resulting in a collection that was more embellished, celebrating craft techniques with striking tone-on-tone embroideries and fringing evoking sheaves of wheat.
These added poetic touches to her contemporary layered and deconstructed tailoring, for instance with a fluid cream pantsuit embroidered across its front with bright physalis lanterns. Another highlight was an écru sleeveless jacket embroidered with diagonal patterns and paired with matching loose pants.
One of her bestsellers from collections past, the synthetic leather Wine bag, played a key role, both literally and metaphorically. For this collection, Litkovska chose to pull the popular product apart and make it into a striking graphic skirt. Its mesh-like cutouts tied in with the theme, resembling humble net shopping bags for carrying home the freshly picked fruit of the land — or Litkovska’s own harvest that she had brought along for guests to take away as mementos.
At the entrance to the venue, crates were filled with apples, bread, flowers, ears of dried wheat and postcards from people in Ukraine thanking the fashion world for its support, as well as seed packets, candles and even rubble from the fallen buildings of her country.
The presentation included the unveiling of a charitable capsule collection called “Flowers Know Better,” created with fashion photographer Nick Knight, whose floral artworks in the colors of the Ukrainian flag were interpreted in prints, embroideries and patchworks on a series of silhouettes. The concept was inspired by the resilience of nature that springs forth even amid devastation. All profits from the initiative, launching next February, are destined to help children impacted by the war in Ukraine.
