DRESSED IN STONE AND LIGHT
Fashion designer Daria Plaksyuk trained to become an architect, grew up among sewing machines and built a brand from the conviction that garments can carry the weight of a city. With PODYH, a Kyiv-based brand, she translates architectural heritage into clothing. Drawing on Ukrainian vernacular forms, modernism and Art Nouveau, her collections turn facades, cornices and disappearing buildings into pieces shaped by memory, war and cultural preservation…
Daria Plaksyuk (* 1995) is a Ukrainian fashion designer and the founder of PODYH. The architect by trade launched the brand in 2021 with a collection inspired by Kyiv’s modernist
architecture. Her work sits at the intersection of architectural research and fashion design: each collection explores a specific style or era of architecture, translating its forms,
materials and ornaments into clothing. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Daria has continued to work and create in Kyiv. She is married to an architect who
teaches architectural design and is an integral part of the PODYH team.
PODYH (Ukrainian for breath) is a Kyiv-based fashion brand. Each collection is rooted in architectural research, from Ukrainian folk vernacular and Kyiv modernism to Crimean
Tatar heritage and, most recently, European Art Nouveau. The pieces are named after architectural elements in their native languages, and signature handmade details – leather
flowers, bas-relief bags, hand-shaped brooches – connect the garment to the building that inspired it. The brand has been presented at London Fashion Week.
You spent your childhood at a garment factory where your grandmother worked, then deliberately chose architecture school. What exactly led you to do that, and how do you view that decision in hindsight?
When I was choosing my path, fashion design in Ukraine was still finding its footing, so I turned toward a discipline I believed – wrongly, as I would later discover – could hold my creative ambitions. Architecture is unforgiving in its rigour: alongside painting, sculpture and design, we studied the resistance of materials, building physics, the weight of legislation. The kind of creating I longed for would have remained out of reach for me as an architect. And yet I don’t regret a single year of it. Architecture taught me how to see, how to think in structure, how to approach the act of making and it is precisely that gaze I now bring to clothing.
You name pieces after architectural elements – Gont, Tes, Lyshtva, Vitryak. Plus, those words are in Ukrainian. For wearers outside Ukraine, they are unfamiliar words. How do you work with the language, with (mis)understanding?
For me, it’s important to convey the inspiration and to immerse the brand’s “viewer” in the architecture itself, so using terms native to Ukrainian architecture feels justified – the name is a continuation of the inspiration. We had a collection inspired by the architecture of Crimea where we used Crimean Tatar names for the same reason: to bring the viewer closer to that architectural world. The same applies to our latest Art Nouveau collection. That said, every product page carries a description of the inspiration along with images of the architecture or the specific detail, so the viewer can always understand the reference and where it comes from.
How has the Russian invasion affected your work?
In truth, the war redrew the very direction of PODYH. The architecture-inspired PODYH began just before the invasion, in the autumn of 2021, with the KYIV MODERNISM collection. For spring 2022 I was already planning BAUHAUS – I wanted to step straight into Europe, into wider themes. The 24th of February changed everything. When I returned to work, I understood that I could not move outward yet, I had to turn inward, toward
Ukraine, toward my home.
As paradoxical as it may sound, did the war, in a way, give you strength and a new impetus for your work?
The war truly changed me, as it changed every Ukrainian. It forced each of us to look inward and to find a new foundation in these difficult times – something to keep creating and living on. For me, that foundation first became Ukrainian folk architecture, and from there I decided to continue exploring our architectural heritage more broadly. Many other brands and designers began researching and reinterpreting other facets of Ukrainian
identity – culture, poetry, crafts and so much more.
You‘ve spoken about how the war made you look inward, and how Ukrainian folk architecture became a source of strength for you personally during that time. Can you describe what that actually looked like in practice?
When I begin researching a style or an era of Ukrainian architecture, I first try to understand the architects and craftsmen who shaped it – why they chose certain forms, materials or colours. From there, the mood of a collection begins to emerge: the spirit of the period, its buildings and defining details. I then imagine how those same craftsmen, given fabric
instead of stone, might have worked in clothing – what silhouettes, compositions and palette they would have chosen. The collection becomes a quiet dialogue across time.
You are preserving and celebrating Ukrainian architectural heritage at the very moment some of it is being destroyed. Does that urgency change the emotional weight of what you create? Does a garment feel different when the building that inspired it no longer exists or may not?
You can read more from the interview HERE.
You can also read about PODYH here.
Text: Diana Rykrová | Photo: Christina Nikitina, Nadia Berska
