National costume is part of the identity of any nation. The costume bears the encrypted cultural code, as embroidery ornaments, fabrics used for tailoring, and the composition of the costume itself. In today’s world, mass culture has overtaken the national costume by universal clothing. Young people in Comrat, Moscow, and New York wear jeans. Ethnic identity in clothing has become of secondary importance and finds its place only at festivals, celebrations and in ethnographic museums.
The destiny of the Gagauz costume was the same – in the globalized world it was pushed out by everyday things familiar to us, despite the fact that the Gagauz costume itself is not usual for the Moldovan space, where white woven garments with embroidery prevail (among Moldovans, Romanians and Ukrainians). Gagauz costume is unique and authentic, it does not have embroidery, but is made of fabrics of different colors. Bright and mottled they stand out from the background of the others.
Lidiya Todieva lives and works in Çadır-Lunga. She is famous all over Gagauzia for restoring and refining national Gagauz costumes. She gives them a second chance to become fashionable and popular again.
Lidiya was born and raised in Çadır-Lunga, in the family of a tailor. Her father and two of his brothers were tailors. She followed their example and entered Chisinau Polytechnic College, now it is Polytechnic College in Ryshkanovka, the Garment Technologist Department. Having graduated in 1980, she entered distance-learning department at the Institute of Technology in Kiev:
“College provided outstanding training. I was a technologist, but I terribly envied fashion designers. They could be easily recognized in the streets – in those years, our fashion designers were the best dressed. They were the most beautiful girls, it was immediately clear that they were from our college”.
After her studies, she returned to Çadır-Lunga where she began to work. In various years she worked at a factory, taught arts and crafts at school, while now, for the last 13 years, she has been working at the Children’s Activity Center. Initially, she began to work in this Center by making garments from non-traditional materials – paper, oilcloth. Seeing girls in such costumes on the stage, many people did not believe that it is possible to create high fashion outfits from such materials.
However, there was an event in Lidiya’s life that turned all her work in an absolutely different direction. In 2012, she went to a seminar in the Ukrainian Carpathians. She was very surprised how carefully local Ukrainian craft artists preserve their national costumes, their traditional embroidered shirts – vyshyvankas.
“There were very interesting masters of embroidery there! They paid so much attention to their national costumes, I was so sorry that we did not have any embroidery. For many years, I have been tormented by the question why national costumes are everywhere but we don’t have them. We have to pass something to our children, well, they will not forgive us if we don’t show what our national costume was like”.
Having returned home with a fervent desire to start working with national costumes, she began to make dolls. Or rather, doll costumes. Now many people know Lidiya as a craftswoman of dolls, but in fact the dolls were the first step on the way to creating a national Gagauz costume.
“Initially, it was difficult to create a collection of national Gagauz costumes for adults because I needed a lot of fabrics, but I had several Soviet dolls of good quality and I decided to make several dolls in authentic national costumes for an exhibition. I don’t have this collection anymore; it was all sold out. It was so sad to part with them because I tried not to repeat myself in that collection. In spite of the fact that there were many small details there, I made all of them in the finest details”.
Just because costumes were made and are being made for dolls does not mean that they lack something. Lidiya recreates the costume in every detail, just in smaller size. This helps people who want to order a costume, to see how it will look, to choose the color range of all the elements.
“Dolls are not drawings, you can see them from all sides, as in 3D. I take into account complexion and eye color. It helps to pick up the fabric for the apron and trimming. To choose the shade of the lace – there are so many different shades of only white color. Though I take a ready-made doll, often times I have to remodel the figure. It takes a week to make a costume for a doll”.
Her dolls have become popular. They are bought by people, museums, they are in high demand. At the beginning, it was difficult for her to part with them. One of her first dolls was bought by one woman. It took her quite a while to persuade Lydia to sell it to her:
“One of the first dolls was bought by a woman begged who saw her grandmother in it”. How carefully she was carrying it in the square, she did not hide it anywhere, just hugged it and was walking with it”.
After the dolls, Lidiya switched to costumes for people. Most often people bring her the costumes themselves. They see photos of her works in newspapers and understand that they can trust her:
“I restore old garments. This pink dress was brought by one elderly woman. She said: “I have been hiding it for so long, I kept it in my chest. It was made by my mother. And this dress is of great value for me. Every minuscule stitch was hand-made by my mother”. When she saw pictures of our first few dresses in the newspaper, she gave it to me. After our first festival, when she saw a girl in this dress on the catwalk, she said, “Well, now I can be satisfied”.
The dresses that get on Lidiya’s sewing table are restored, in some cases are refined following modern technologies but in view of tailoring traditions of those times. We should not forget that these dresses were made decades ago, when the sewing technique was very different from modern one. Lidiya can change something by adding some element, or by changing it, but conceptually the costume and tailoring technique remain the same.
“The technology itself is so complex that when I turn to a seamstress with some particular order, we have to discuss it a lot. No independent actions, because any step aside and the costume is distorted”.
The Gagauz costume consists of many parts. Lidiya explains those details:
“Gagauz women costume, of course, consists of a long undershirt, it was called “ich helme”. A sleeveless dress was put on it, a pinafore dress called “chukman”. Then goes an apron. It is the summer version. In autumn, they put on a dress made of thicker fabric and with long sleeves. In addition, the under shirt was always with long sleeves, the dress was also with long sleeves and then on the top of them leather cuffs were put on. They also wore a set of skirt and a peplum blouse. Peplum is the lower part and now we have developed a modern cut of such a peplum, similar to chimere. It emphasizes the silhouette so elegantly. Then the silhouette with a slightly high waistline is another feature of our costume. Even my grandmother, who was born in 1903, for some reason she always pointed to me at the waist line. There was no low neckline whatsoever, the button closure should reach the neck, everything should be completely covered. Sleeves should be long, and cover elbows and the dress should cover knees”.
“Another component of our costume was called “lift”. These are golden Hungarian coins. They were big and small. One could determine the prosperity of a girl by the number of these coins. Girls would put them on even when they went to work in the field. Embroidery on the garment can tell about many things. But there is no embroidery here, therefore there are not so many specific features. It is the absence of embroidery that indicates that the costume is Gagauz”.
The Gagauz had different costumes: everyday and festive ones. And the costumes differed not so much by seasons, but by religious holidays. For example, all the clothes were supposed to be renewed by Easter. A girl was supposed to appear in a new dress and this also corresponds to the time of the year. A costume told a lot about the culture and was closely intertwined with other parts of Gagauz life, such as dancing and weddings. For instance, a skirt was made intentionally with a very heavy bottom, so that when a girl danced, the skirt would look like a dome. And while dancing a girl does not demonstrate so much herself but her dress.
Bride’s wedding dress also differed from the dresses of neighboring nations – it was practically never white. On the contrary, it was of not very bright color – emerald or the color of the earth. This was because at the wedding the most attention was paid to the wedding proxies, or the best man and the maid of honor, rather than to the bride and the groom.
Also, the costume could tell a lot about the time and the values. There is winter costume in the Čadır-Lung Museum. The costume was quite loose in the waist. Such costumes were popular in the 50s, right after the famine of 1946-1947. Lidiya supposes that after the famine, stoutness was the sign of prosperity and it was not hidden.
Despite the fact that we know some causal links, there are many gaps in the Gagauz history that have yet to be filled. Because of these gaps, it is very difficult to work on a Gagauz costume now in the 21st century:
“Of course, there are many mysteries in our history, and I would like to learn more, because without the past I can’t make a costume today the way it should be. That is probably why nobody still makes traditional Gagauz costumes. To venture to promote the costume without the basics and historical foundation is very difficult. “Give us embroidery, everyone has it, we don’t have it” – I have to invent it today and so that it can show that yes, it is Gagauz girl walking. The same with men – how to make a man in modern shirt stand out as Gagauz? We do not know our history and it’s a pity”.
Nevertheless, gaps in knowledge do not stop Lidiya. She actively researches this topic on the Internet. She saves old photographs from archives, where the costumes can be clearly seen, she makes certain conclusions on their basis that help her to create something new in her work.
“Evolution of the national costume is one of the directions of our culture. I had to preserve the dress so that I could then prove that yes, indeed there was lace – some say, that there was no embroidery. Yes, I know but there are some elements. There were no bright costumes? But here you are, you see bright costumes in my collection. We can see bright colours of the dresses made from manufactured fabric. But in my collection, I have garments also made of home woven fabrics. The fabric itself is not wide because the looms were narrow. These are primarily woolen fabrics. Not everything has survived to this day because moths like it a lot. But fabrics were made not only of wool, but also of cotton, linen and hemp”.
Lidiya is convinced that the national costume can regain its significance. She is confident that such clothes can be easily put on when going out to demostrate one’s identity.
“This is our culture; we need to make more efforts. When I say today that you can easily wear it out in the street, they do not believe and disagree. But we are losing our identity in such a way. On the contrary, we must restore it and differ from others in something. In 2019, I visited Saudi Arabia. People there still wear clothes that they were wearing a thousand years ago. It is so wonderful when people are faithful to their traditions, their religion”.
“In the past I could say what village a person is from and what is his ethnic identity just by looking at the way they are dressed. Today, people all over the world look the same – no colors and jeans. Everybody keeps an eye on the novelties of my collection. They know by heart everything that comes out. My last order was made for a girl from Chisinau, she ordered a national Gagauz coat, she is Gagauz herself. She has also ordered a blouse with a skirt from our collection. People either choose or order a copy from our collection. Because all the garments I have served as samples, or rather sketches for a new model. People will wear them because they become fashionable already”.
“We also can rise to the heights of haute couture, but it is very expensive … if someone told me today, “I’m ready to pay for a collection of haute couture in Gagauz national style – I’m ready”.
While working at the Children’s Activity Center, Lidiya introduces the children to history and teaches them some tailoring skills. Of course, the most responsible work on the costume is done by herself – too much responsibility. Some of the dresses in her collection can be 50 to 60 years old, or even more, but children are happy about this. It is an opportunity to become acquainted with their own history.
“I cultivate their taste and tell them about our history. With great pleasure they examine old photos, study history, tell the stories of their grandmothers. Every family has its own stories and children are very interested in them. They probably feel my excitement about this and get inspired as well and are happy to engage in this”.
“The most important thing for the history is that it doesn’t end. “That is why we are doing this now, so that we could pass it on to our children and they knew their history”. I want them to remember as much as possible and learn more about their ancestors”.
