An Interview With a Ukrainian Designer Stuck at Milan Fashion Week
On Wednesday, Ukrainian outerwear model Ienki Ienki, which is recognised for its luxe quilted down jackets, offered its Fall-Winter season 2022 assortment at Milan Fashion 7 days. On Thursday, the brand’s founder and designer, Dima Ievenko, woke up at 5:20 a.m in his Milanese lodge home, checked his cellphone, and observed it was entire of messages from relatives members, pals, and staff members in Ukraine. Ievenko, who life and will work in Kyiv, was bleary eyed and fatigued from many evenings of fitful rest. But the messages couldn’t have been clearer: “It began. Oh my god, it started out,” Ievenko recalled reading through. Russia had released a whole-scale invasion into Ukraine.
Quickly, Ievenko’s most important worry went from promoting a selection to figuring out how to assistance his 120 Kyiv-dependent workforce, as he informed me about the cellphone Friday evening in Milan: “I’m with just about every particular person continuously on the phone, inquiring the place are you, what is occurring.” Some of his personnel, he said, have fled Kyiv and are striving to get to Poland. Lots of some others seem to be remaining in the metropolis, which is reportedly under increasingly significant Russian bombardment. Ievenko has expended just about each and every waking hour considering that the invasion started seeking to enable them come across harmless destinations to keep. “It’s quite apparent: if you can go away, you go away,” he claimed. “But now, there is no other alternative.”
Ievenko is 1 of many Ukrainian designers who are now inadvertent refugees from a war they didn’t be expecting. And they are trapped in the center of a style marketplace spectacle that, as much as they’ve seen, hasn’t acknowledged the horrifying conflict occurring not too considerably away. (Ievenko’s flight from Kyiv to Milan took two hours and forty minutes.) “Here in Milan there are tons of persons, the weather is gorgeous, the COVID constraints are not that significant, and individuals are dressed up for the road style,” he explained to me. “And we are likely in among them in a fully distinct actuality.”
The condition is, of program, exceptionally private for Ievenko and his fellow Ukrainians in Milan, and the scenario is transforming speedily. But so far, events in Milan suggest that the manner entire world is not going to let a war spoil displays and functions planned months in progress. There was no acknowledgment of the invasion at the large and star-studded Gucci and Prada displays, which would not automatically appear like a large deal—fashion demonstrate-goers, to say very little of multinational luxury models, have never been fantastic at tactfully acknowledging political or humanitarian crises—if it hadn’t been described that Italy was attempting to carve out an exemption for luxury products from the EU’s subsequent round of sanctions in opposition to Russia. (The Italian key minister’s business issued a denial this afternoon.)
One particular may possibly count on the tone to change in the coming days. In the previous numerous decades, Ukraine designers and models have been a peaceful but growing existence on the international stage. Ienki Ienki is between the most popular, having been stocked at the likes of SSENSE and Bergdorf’s for quite a few decades, but Kyiv-centered makes like Frolov and 91Lab are starting off to make sounds as effectively. This season alone, 6 Ukrainian designers took portion in a demonstrating at New York Style 7 days. According to WWD, quite a few of them are now trapped in Kyiv.