Runway

hope by hope Restores What History Tried to Forget

Designer Nadia Dobrovolska dismantles vintage menswear to restore a forgotten family history in hope by hope's Evfrosyniia collection at Ukrainian Fashion Week SS27.

By Bhagya Rose

Updated 11:13 am EDT, September 9, 2026

Published 11:10 am EDT, September 9, 2026

Photo Courtesy: Ukrainian Fashion Week
Runway Photographer: Volodymyr Bosak
Backstage Photographer: Serhiy Khandusenko
Special Thanks: Yelyzaveta Ushcheka

Designer Nadia Dobrovolska dismantles vintage menswear to restore a forgotten family history in hope by hope's Evfrosyniia collection at Ukrainian Fashion Week SS27.

Updated 11:13 am EDT, September 9, 2026

Published 11:10 am EDT, September 9, 2026

Photo Courtesy: Ukrainian Fashion Week
Runway Photographer: Volodymyr Bosak
Backstage Photographer: Serhiy Khandusenko
Special Thanks: Yelyzaveta Ushcheka

It is not uncommon for fashion to talk about nostalgia and memory. But in Evfrosyniia, hope by hope makes memory feel extraordinarily physical and almost tangible.

Designer Nadia Dobrovolska presented the collection at the Ukrainian Fashion Week’s New Names platform for SS27. Named Evfrosyniia, the collection takes its name from a real woman in Nadia’s family history, who was born in 1915 and disappeared as a three-year-old amid the unrest and upheavals of her time. A decade later, the designer helps bring forward her name to the present.

Through the collection, what begins as a personal family story gradually becomes something larger, deeper, and more thought-provoking. The context itself makes you dwell on each piece and presentation, making it a meditation of sorts on forced disappearance, the right to exist, and the way history leaves some people behind, unfairly.

As much as it was anticipated at the start, the clothes made the argument beautifully, without trying to romanticize the past. They relied on references just enough to make the transformation a grand spectacle.

Unmaking the Uniform

At its core, the collection draws from vintage men’s jackets and shirts; garments that have forever been flagbearers of patriarchy, authority, militarism, and rigid social structures. The brand hope by hope carefully dismantles them, breaks apart the quintessential control elements of the garments, and reconstructs them into women’s silhouettes. The outcome is stunningly significant, rife with transformative symbolism. Clothing pieces once designed around systems of power and control take the form of armor; the way the narrative changes from power to protection is remarkable.

Sustainability is not just a surface-level commitment for the brand. Upcycling is not a mere environmental gesture. The designer treats the process as more of a methodology for remembering long-forgotten details of the past. She doesn’t discard old garments; instead, she breaks them apart, preserves their material history oh-so-intricately, and rearranges them in her feminine silhouettes. This way, the past is not erased; it just tells something different. Once again, hope by hope carefully reminds us how history once conveniently erased what it ought not to have.

A Quiet Act of Restoration

Aside from the power-to-protect narrative, there is also something subtly confrontational about transforming inherently masculine clothing into protective feminine forms. The collection suggests that strength doesn’t necessarily have to be confined to its original shape. It can be dismantled, softened, and reconstituted, and still be preserved in essence, even in its new form.

The consistent use of oak foliage throughout the collection further deepened the ideas of inheritance and continuity. At some point, the personal story transcends into a collective message; one forgotten three-year-old becomes a voice for countless lives threatened by disappearance, erasure, displacement, and the subsequent loss of cultural memory.

Perhaps this is where Evfrosyniia assumes its strongest purpose. Rather than becoming a mere illustration of its own story, its pieces work through history and beyond the biography; the reconstructed tailoring gives the collection the independence of expression. There is a solid tension in each of the silhouettes, because there is tension in the subject – between protection and vulnerability, inheritance and loss, remembering and forgetting.

Ultimately, Evfrosyniia manages not just to preserve and reminisce about an image, but also to restore it. It opens up history for all to see and interpret without letting the story remain a mere forgotten tale.

Bhagya Rose

Editor, Fashion

An introverted personal stylist and writer, Bhagya has a flair for dissecting runway looks and translating them for real life. When she’s not analyzing colors, silhouettes and putting together OOTDs, she spends time reading, shopping, and taking care of her little fur-gang.

Tags: Ukrainian Fashion Week, Ukrainian Fashion Week SS27

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