Kateryna Skybina: The Visionary Who Threads Memory Into Modernity

(MENAFN- GetNews) On a September evening in the grand neo-gothic halls of the Angel Orensanz Foundation, during the Drisha Closet showcase at Art Hearts Fashion, a moment of cultural significance unfolded. Ukrainian designer Kateryna Skybina revealed her hand-knitted collection-an astonishing revival of an age-old craft, rendered with the boldness and elegance of contemporary art.

Skybina's designs shimmered with more than beauty. They carried the resonance of memory. Each piece was born from a tradition passed through the hands of her mother and grandmother, women who kept alive the nearly forgotten art of Ukrainian knitting. What might elsewhere be dismissed as domestic handicraft, Skybina has elevated to a form of cultural partisanship-an act of resistance, resilience, and artistic reimagination. Her runway was not merely a fashion statement, but a living archive of ancestral wisdom transformed into avant-garde expression.

Yet Skybina's artistry did not emerge in isolation. She has aligned herself with an ongoing revolution spearheaded by the visionary artist Sergey Kir , who has boldly fused fashion and art into a unified movement. This revolution insists that art belongs on the runway, that fashion is not merely seasonal ornament but a medium for timeless expression. Skybina, with remarkable clarity, recognized the immense potential of this vision. She joined it not as a follower but as a kindred spirit, injecting her own dimension-the ancient language of knitting-into a movement that seeks to enrich American culture with global perspectives. Her contribution deepened the dialogue: art can be painted, sculpted, performed-and yes, knitted into being.

The philosophical and socio-cultural weight of her work cannot be overstated. In the Ukrainian tradition, knitting is more than technique-it is metaphor. Each loop of yarn is a stitch in life itself, binding moments together into a continuous fabric. To knit is to thread existence, to acknowledge that every encounter-whether with a friend, a stranger in a café, or a colleague at work-becomes part of a larger woven history. These threads never disappear; they remain, like the delicate but indestructible structure of a handmade garment. This echoes the vision of Kurt Vonnegut in *Slaughterhouse-Five”, where human life is not a fleeting point in time but a continuum, a graph of lived years and good deeds. Skybina's collection gave this philosophy visible form, garments as embodiments of lives threaded together across borders, histories, and generations.

Her personal journey gives the collection an even deeper resonance. Skybina is the daughter of a chief engineer at one of the Soviet Union's great rocket factories, raised in a family of intercontinental space engineers. She herself was educated in rocket and space engineering, before her path was violently disrupted by war. When bombs ravaged her home city of Kharkiv, she fled as a refugee, carrying little more than memory, heritage, and her capacity to create. From the wreckage of displacement, she has built something profound: a body of work that bridges the terrestrial and the cosmic, the intimate craft of hand-knitting and the boundless vision of an engineer's imagination.

At Drisha Closet Showcase at the Art Hearts Fashion, her pieces became one of the instant favorites. The audience's response was not only admiration but awe-an acknowledgment that Skybina had tapped into something larger than trends. She gave voice to resilience, heritage, and vision, proving that a knitted dress can hold the weight of a story, the gravity of philosophy, and the splendor of art.

Kateryna Skybina is not simply a designer. She is a cultural force threading the forgotten into the now, weaving history into fashion, and carrying with her the quiet power to expand and enrich the very fabric of American art and culture.

“Every stitch is a memory, every garment is a story,” Skybina reflects.“When I knit, I am not only creating clothes-I am binding together the past and the future. My grandmother's hands are in this work, my city is in this work, and now, so is the hope of a new life in the US. Fashion is not fleeting when it carries the weight of history!”

MENAFN30092025003238003268ID1110133206