Radvile Kisieliute, design process

Collection is inspired by weather vanes from my home country Lithuania, seaside town called Nida. The symbols carved in weather vanes works as visual profile from which you could tell everything about the owner and his family. Each sailor used them to distinguish himself from other sailors and identify the area or town they came from. Same as our clothes nowadays these symbols worked as a profile and helped to identify sailor’s origin, attitude, standpoints and send visual messages to others.

By exploring ethnographic and historical material, I related the human body parts with weather vane parts, so each part of the body gained different symbols which added meaning to each side of the body. My further research in other tribes as Pagan and Vikings helped me to find similar meaning symbols to each part of the weather vane in these tribes and to assign these symbols to body sides as well.

I deeply explored symbols through fashion perspective. The exploration of the symbols and ascription of them to the body parts was interpreted and developed into garments through garment construction, form, shape and colour.