Fashioning my identity

The clothes we wear are meaningful components of an intricately woven system of fashion, appearance and identity, speaking volumes about places and communities with which we associate ourselves.

Recognising this and reflecting upon my own diasporic experiences as a Greek Cypriot-South African, my honours’ fashion design collection, entitled “Motherland”, is a celebration of the people and places I feel most connected to.

In this work I wanted to explore the ways in which I could use Greek folklore in the design of a contemporary and innovative fashion collection while simultaneously honouring Greek cultural heritage and identity.

The created garments take form as textured, material collages that reflect and juxtapose a variety of traditional techniques with new silhouettes and modern practices, while also abstractly translating the symbols and stories of Greek folklore.

As an added narrative, the collection incorporates found fabrics, tablecloths, doilies and tapestries all handcrafted by my mother and grandmothers, and each garment was stitched together on a sewing machine that was passed down to me.

So, while the collection is, or rather began as, an interrogation into the many different aspects of folklore and culture and their relationship with Greek traditional dress, the exploration of the topic, the creation of a fashion collection and the use of the material culture of my own family has become, in some way, a serendipitous and subconscious continuation of these generational and ancestral practices carried out by the women before me, guiding my every move in the process of creation.

This project was a labour of love, history and exploration that evolved into a collective palimpsest of cultural and personal embodied memory that has allowed me the opportunity to experiment, discover and fuse different parts of myself, bringing my heritage into the contemporary spaces of fashion that I inhabit.