A Letter and Love Confession to the Beloved City

Can a foreigner adopt a foreign city as his or her own home? Can their shared love for a place connect people who don’t know each other? The model, whose silhouette is based on the shape of an envelope, is made from a transparent fabric through which bands are visible with printed quotes and thoughts about Sofia, collected by the designer Alexander Gerginov from friends and acquaintances. They do not just create the individual and personal fabric of the garment, but also symbolize the close ties between people and the possibility of communication among them, regardless of the distances that may separate them. Sofia is imagined as a gathering point of people from different countries, united by their love for the city and the freedom to do what they want, which the city grants them.

An Architectural Document with Alternative Aesthetics

The emblematic architecture of the prefabricated concrete-slab apartment buildings, also known as Plattenbauten, shapes the appearance of many parts of the city and testifies to a historical period marked by a drive to effectively and quickly build housing for large numbers of people during a period of growing industrialization. The high-rise prefabricated apartment buildings in Sofia, characterized by their monotone, severely geometric shapes, serve as the inspiration for Georgi Florov’s design, which creates a three-dimensional structure of stylized, machine-embroidered contours of doors, windows, and an entryway, which form an overly elongated silhouette of the movable front of the garment. Revealed under this front is a dress in clean lines, suggesting a stable architectural construction.

This type of architecture, which has often been labeled as unsightly, offers the idea for the development of a new type of aesthetics, originating from our immediate surroundings.

A Refuge in the Impersonal Urban Crowd

Our city feels like a home when it gives us a sense of belonging, regardless of our nationality, race, gender, religion, or orientation. Diliana Ivanova discovers the textile symbol of the cozy sense of home in the shape of a loose, wide fabric case, which she uses as a basis to create her garment’s silhouette and decorates it with a drawing of a crowd of people, embroidered over the chest. The city breathes with the rhythm of the crowd—every individual has the right either to join it and merge with its anonymity, or to stand out, to break open the comfortable shell and reveal his or her real essence, his or her own “contour.” The personal perception of the dynamics of the city, the duality between the masses and the individual, is translated into the loose shape of the garment, which contains countless options—just like the urban environment itself.

A Burden in the Everyday Routine

When everyday life in the city turns into a routine and we blindly follow the norms, principles, clichés, and requirements that others impose on us, urban existence can turn into chaos. Or into a uniformity whose comfortable repeatability is difficult to escape. By creating a broadly encompassing, large-scale silhouette of a garment with an enormous hood covering the face, Igor Ilijovski represents this burden through elastic hooks that fasten the garment to the floor (or the surrounding space) and only allow the body partial freedom of movement. The fear of sinking into the impersonal everyday rituals is translated into a garment which is devoid of the mobility characteristic of the body and which resembles in its scale and staticity an imposing, but soulless architectural site.

A Carrier of Home Around the World

The city-home as an epicenter, which completely fills your inner emotional space, regardless of your geographical location, and especially when you’re physically away from it. But also a liberal home with open doors, a departure point into other directions, which remains calm and confident in your eventual return. Neli Mitewa returns to Sofia over and over again, to her nomadic home and to the room filled with suitcases. Suitcases with clothes for different seasons, with belongings invoking memories, and with “mobile” contents, ready for short trips and for longer journeys to more distant places. The suitcase is packed instantaneously, almost mechanically, and allows you to leave quickly and head anywhere. In the conceptual half-transparent garment, the suitcase is built into an airy silhouette, while its missing bottom seeks to reflect its owner’s unrealized dream of traveling without too much luggage. With luggage that contains parts of her Sofia home, so she can leave Sofia, to then return to it once again.

The emotional interpretation of the longing to belong to a particular place and at the same time, the freedom to leave that place, constructs a garment–object with a mobile silhouette, whose form transforms through the movements of the arms and the body, and within which an attempt at flying has been encoded...

Collected Childhood Memories

Perhaps our city, a long time ago, was prettier, cozier, warmer . . . That is how it always appears when childhood memories, slightly faded, take us back to places that we once loved, places that we associate with specific people and unforgettable experiences. Stanislava Dimitrova and Antoniya Raycheva engage these memories by using actual black-and-white photographs of various Sofia spots that were emblematic in their erstwhile children’s consciousness, such as the park in front of the National Theatre, the stairs in front of the Palace of Justice, and the Soviet Army monument. The images are then transferred onto faded prints, which create the material used for the lining of their garment—an oversized coat. The coat’s quilting, on the other hand, is a reference to the warm and soft blanket associated with the warmth and coziness of home. The outside surface of this coat/quilt is reminiscent of the outline of a house in the same way a child would draw “home.” The quilted blanket under whose cover the child feels safe and protected while reading a book by the light of a flashlight late at night...

The garment as a witness to the times, which also preserves our personal and emotional memory.

The garment becomes a portable refuge of domesticity, so that its wearers feel safe and protected even when not at home, and which allows them to carry the sense of home with them.