Although seemingly at rest, the garments created by Alexander Gerginov are actually dynamic—they contain the potential for movement and a readiness for a spontaneous departure. The garments contain all that we need when we decide to depart at a moment’s notice, which liberates us from the requirement to look for and pack different belongings: they are two-in-one (a garment/blanket) or all-in-one (a garment/backpack); they’re hybrids that spontaneously respond to all our traveling needs and allow for the transformation of flatness into three-dimensionality, of simplicity into function.

The constructive solutions and the visual impact are based on the methodology of minimalism and on one of its principles: transformation. In the garment/blanket, the basic shape of the rectangle is used as a foundation, which then constructively changes its meaning and function:

The flat blanket transforms into a three-dimensional object/dress.

In the wardrobe/backpack, the simple rectangular shape functions on the principle of a spiral consisting of numerous points in a particular trajectory, so that every point creates a station, a (temporary) settling in a specific place. The rectangular plane, when coiled in the shape of a spiral, contains the potential for movement and a readiness to react and adapt according to the circumstances. In that way, the spiral-shaped wardrobe contains garments for a variety of occasions—a dress, a jacket, a t-shirt, a swimsuit. While any one of them is in use according to the specific place and the wearer’s needs, the others can be put away in the compartments of the case, which can be worn on the back, to be easily and quickly taken out when they’re needed.

The physical absence of the body intensifies the suggestion of movement: the body, or the person, moves from one point to another and travels between the stations, where each station is a temporary settling down. The end is a beginning.

Transformability and hybridity are two of contemporary design’s main trends—they characterize garments that ensure their owners’ survival and existence in a world full of dualities, conflicts, and changes. They give garments a meaningful function that goes beyond their purely practical function.

In the first garment, the human being’s light is expressed through the structure of brain folds. They are characterized by the smoothness of their flow and create harmonious and constructive shapes.

The shadow, which the second garment interprets, is the mirror image of the light. It causes compensatory behavior and brings inferiority complexes, fear, envy, and malice to the surface. But it is also precisely through the shadow that one’s gifts and talents—the human qualities that set each person apart—are manifested. They also determine which of these two polar opposites human nature will tip towards, which path it will choose, how truly and far it will follow it. Once a person realizes their gifts and talents, the things that set them apart from everyone else, they can change the direction of their path as needed. In this way, although they have a seemingly similar shape and share a completely organic structure, the two garments are set apart by their tonalities—hues of the same color that go from light to dark—as well as by the softness or hardness of their details.

It is precisely these differences that make a difference in the globalized world—rather than the flattening or the colorless adaptation to the way things are, it is the cultivation and appreciation of the enriching effect of differences that turns the world into an interesting place to inhabit.

In this case, the garment—with its newly created tactile and organic structure—serves as the field for a scientific experiment whose results lead to the identification of social trends.

Diliana Ivanova fully realizes the inner strength and stability that result from knowing yourself and knowing the places where you feel like you belong. Seemingly concealed as if by a cover, her designs reveal this rich interior by transforming this cover/shell into an umbilical cord/waist sash, which takes you far away but always brings you back to the beginning—to the stability of home, located somewhere around the world or inside yourself. Underneath the cover, the garment’s interior reveals, through knots, the places of longer or shorter stays, your possible homes and the stations you have passed though, that you’ve appreciated, or that you want to forget, the places that have left a scar on your emotional consciousness. The knot can be untied, the place can be changed. It is up to you. Along with your consciousness, you are the point of support at the crossroads and you decide which way you go. Each new journey allows you to gain more knowledge, experience, and emotional memory. You cross realities, worlds, cultures.

Diliana Ivanova’s second design symbolizes the emotional “baggage” that we bring along or accumulate during our journeys: each of the numerous hooks on the garment is a potential place where something—a memory, an experience, a happy or a painful occurrence, a person, or a feeling—can be either hung or taken down.

The static object/garment turns into a flexible, transformable field that can be directed and manipulated by its owner to reflect his or her urges, desires, and actions.

Through his project, Georgi Florov seeks to bring at least a speck of individuality and a sense of comfort and security to these in-between spaces, which are usually devoid of identity. To that end, he creates a comfortable and soft article/object intended to help the traveler overcome the problem of sleeping in a new place rather than in their own bed and to help them feel at home anywhere. As a two-dimensional object, it resembles a large blanket or cover with a built-in pillow: a portable and wearable version of a “bed.” Simultaneously, the object is a three-dimensional garment: a long trench coat with a quilted back and a soft foam collar.

The second garment’s form has also been developed on the basis of the simple rectangular shape of a blanket, which creates the sense of protection, warmth, and refuge, and which can be worn and taken anywhere. This hybrid blanket-jacket-dress, the garment is simultaneously conceptual and wearable—it is an example of an innovative design based on a wholly new silhouette inspired by an object, which is independent of the short-term trends and reflects global processes that affect our society.

The new concept of combining business travel with leisure time (“bleisure”) is becoming increasingly popular, while couples or families in which one partner works at the other end of the world are becoming an ever more frequent exception to the rule. The precondition for being able to quickly and spontaneously pick up and leave is to travel light, both figuratively and literally. Milena Nacheva interprets this through an almost weightless, super functional vest/backpack with numerous sections and pockets. This small portable container symbolizes the immaterial baggage of emotions, memories, professional and life experience, culture, language, and mentality, which we always “pack” along with our clothes.

When we arrive at a new place, these pieces of our identity become the basis upon which that same identity continues to develop. It integrates the future experiences at the new place, which in turn adds newer nuances to our interior world. The old experiences have to be preserved beneath the future and new accumulations, because they are precisely what make us different and allow us to stand out and remain recognizable.

The organic connection of the garment that we wear with the real and emotional “baggage” that we carry results in a hybrid, multifunctional type of clothing, where symbolism and function merge into one.

When it comes to personal belongings, individuality gives way to total functionality. Economy of space and maximum optimization based on the “all-in-one” principle are sought after. Personal belongings are reduced to a minimum, while dressing according to etiquette has created a sort of mandatory “uniform”: suit-shirt-shiny shoes – if possible, all merged into one. Natalia Zhivkova’s garment has been developed on the basis of the principle of deconstruction—as such, it is a hybrid between the familiar shirt and jacket, which have been merged into one. The sleeves of both garments are attached, which restricts the arms. The zippers connecting the sleeves, however, contain the potential for a release. Various parts of the garment’s construction, which extend into wide and overly long strips that come in and out of the garment or fall freely, also symbolize the search for an alternative, a tearing away, a rejection of this stereotypical and restricted existence.

The hybrid bonding of different parts of classical men’s clothing creates a new experimental silhouette whose functionality has been effaced in favor of a new critical field of meaning.

Natalia Zhivkova’s second design offers a positive interpretation of globalization: the possibility of traveling across the world while carrying it with or within yourself.

Whether real or virtual, traveling to any location in the world, to any continent, is quickly realizable: it is possible to organize a trip around the world online, or even to use Google Maps to instantaneously “head out” to and “visit” distant places. The intertwining of seemingly incompatible cultures happens even without the need to visit their source—fusion cuisine, fusion music, fusion languages, and fusion looks all come to our own doorstep in our own countries.

The world traveler, as imagined by Natalia Zhivkova, boldly travels across different continents and climates—he or she is subjected to cultural, psychological, and physical changes and quickly adapts to new places. The memories and emotions of his or her experiences on all seven continents are preserved in a spherical garment, whose shape is reminiscent of the globe and contains seven ellipses, corresponding to the number of continents and attached to one another via zippers, while hard wires give the light, transparent material its dress shape. When placed over one another and twisted, the ellipses/memories can fit into a smaller, flat shape: a backpack/”album,” which preserves the travel impressions compactly. The methods of deconstruction, transformation, and hybridity allow the designer to achieve a multilayered meaning and a critical interpretation of current social and economic phenomena.

A critical position towards the values of this or that place also has its consequences: a splitting and scattering, and the feeling of “in-betweenness,” which turns into a permanent state similar to the sense of the non-place and the absence of any kind of belonging. With her several “stations,” interpreted through basic folded shapes in the garments, Neli Mitewa presents the states of restriction, adaptation, and scattering that she has gone through herself while living or residing in various places for shorter or longer periods.

The formal approach for the garments’ design is inspired by Neli Mitewa’s personal experience while packing her suitcase: every piece of clothing in it is folded in a way that takes the least possible space, fits in with the others, and leaves space for more. The folded garment becomes a reflection of the folded person trying to fit in, who is unable to unfold completely at the new place, where he or she is forced to adapt, integrate, and take on the “traces” and “folds” of others’ identities as his or her own. A “pop-up” personality, which—like a garment that, when unfolded and worn, turns from flat to three-dimensional—manages to stay true to itself and to develop and enrich its identity by borrowing all the best parts from the new place. In other cases, however, it remains folded, tucked away, neutral—or split and scattered, like the button-up dress that is torn in two separate halves, whose base remains nailed down to a place that refuses to release it.

By contrast, the need to belong to a certain place for a longer period of time—a place that fulfills all the preconditions necessary for it to be perceived as a “home”—has been interpreted by connecting the bottom part of the garments to the surrounding environment. But home is only where you feel entirely yourself.

The painful “non-freedom” and the forced adaptation to a place that you may have expected to turn into a home is expressed through the restriction of the movements of the body: the arms and legs are fixed to the ground through the sleeves and the bottom part, whose base is attached to the environment around the body. The place where your movement is restricted, where your autonomy to make decisions is limited, this is a place you need to leave behind. Home is a place you choose on your own. Not a place in which you reside, but a place you inhabit. It contains the potential for mobility or staticity, for leaving or staying. For belonging. It is a collection of the “marks” and traces of the places you go through in order to reach it and decide to stay or not. Or to set out again.

The transferring of paper folding techniques and applying them to fabric and the use of the economy of a two-dimensional object which unfolds to become three-dimensional offer possibilities to make close connections to the ideas of restraint and release, adaptation and unfolding.

A basic shape clearly expresses the meaning of the authenticity of the experience.

In her garments, the designer interprets these theories, stemming also from the visual designs that depict them. Her dress composed of numerous round, flat shapes, as if made up of contrasting borders, forms a layered silhouette, and the loose individual parts can be layered on top of each other or removed, depending on the character, the destination, and the weather conditions of the journey we are embarking on, or according to our frame of mind and the mood we are in and are recreating in the moment.

The second garment is a dissection of the separate composite parts of clothing: the front of a garment, sleeves, lapel, pockets, and skirt, forming the entire garment through the attachment of snap fasteners. They can be assembled and combined in different ways so that the final silhouette could take on varying forms, determined by the desires or perceptions of each viewer or consumer/traveler, and fulfilling different functions corresponding to his or her needs.

Through deconstructivism, an important principle in minimalistic designs composed of basic geometric shapes, as well as through transformativity as a conceptual design perfectly describing the nature of the theme, myriad possible temporary syntheses are achieved. Embedded within these is the potential for change and the possibility of constituting a new adaptive garment, responsive to new circumstances—temporary, changeable, conforming to the current attitude and needs of its wearer.

Sylvia Tsvetanova transforms the transitional space along the way in the journey into a cozy refuge, a harbor for a fleeting sojourn, anywhere and anytime. Her dress/tent and shawl/hammock, which create a temporary home and protection, envelop the body and shelter it, giving it refuge between two destinations. The materials allow them to be used even in different seasons or weather conditions: wide stitches in the crochet-work create ventilated air spaces, and the additional skirt with quilted pieces protects from wind and cold, promising warmth and softness, and perhaps also serving as something in between a quilt and a pillow, which make up your temporary bed in the inhabitable crocheted garment.

The garment/shelters have amorphous volumes, which harbor the potential for transforming from one state to another, changing the shape and its function. And despite this, much like the non-place, they remain universal, incorporeal, and anonymous. Because we can never put down roots in an intermediate, transitional space that is deprived of the preconditions for creating an identity. But we can, with the spirit of an adventurous traveler, take pleasure in it by inhabiting it momentarily. And by shortening the distance, the anticipation, the uncertainty—until the next stop.

The garment’s hybridity and its relationship to an architectural object build upon the clothing’s function with the protective function of a mobile home, and the symbolism is emphasized by its silhouettes, which take on a vast shape, extending beyond the proportions of the body.

When we speak of achievements in fashion, we always emphasize its revolutionary, progressive function as an indicator of and catalyst for changes in society: as, for example, with women’s liberation—the working woman with the right to vote, the active woman, the female professional is accompanied by simplified, practical, functional clothing, free of unnecessary details, not restricting her movements in any way. Clothing that frees the body from uncomfortable or constricting oversized designs. In the pragmatism and functionality of today’s clothing, however, are we not missing the splendor, the drama, and the extravagance of details from past eras? What is different makes the difference—the presence of specific details will prevent uniformity. And function, similar to ideals of beauty, is relative and undergoes metamorphoses: if its character is representative in the historical clothing of royalty, nowadays we connect it with concepts like comfort, convenience, and service.

In her garments developed along this theme, Tsvetalina Atanasova offers us a journey in time, by combining with agility and her innate irony the multifunctional clothing typical of our present day with the variety of elements in royal attire from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo periods. The designer reveals the visual similarity between the royal costume and today’s travel clothing in the abundance of details: with its pockets, zippers, buttons, patches, different mechanisms for fastening and tightening, ties, buckles, welts, and mesh, the functional travel outfit in no way concedes to the royal attire from these periods with its extravagance of ornaments, lace, ties, ribbons, stones, pearls, and other jewels. At the same time, the historical royal costume is a symbol of stationariness and luxury, and today’s travel clothing—of mobility, compactness, and a multitude of functions that facilitate our movement during travel.

Therefore, when the queen/tourist sets out on a journey, she will take, or will actually be dressed in, her mobile home: a backpack or sleeping bag, symbols of the modern dynamic way of life, but individually personalized with her own distinctive signs and symbols. Every ornament, each decorative stitch, each shape and silhouette, in addition to beautifying, also has a function and meaning in the clothing. The ornaments form pockets, the ties and elastics take the shape of pretty floral motifs; ribbons made from athletic straps with snapping plastic fasteners serve to close the garment and have a mechanism through which they can be adjusted quickly and easily; and the metal constructions that form the “panniers” on the skirts, typical of the Rococo silhouette, create separate compartments for baggage in the garment itself. Thus, every single element not only serves a purpose, but is also an individual mark distinguishing what is specifically “ours” in time and space.

The bold integration both of the elements of the clothing and of their different symbolisms in the different historical periods creates hybrid garments that not only take on additional functional qualities and layers of meaning, but also create the preconditions for their application as elements in eclectic, innovative fusion design.