I’ve recently decided to incorporate more folklore and traditional motifs into my daily life and wardrobe. So with that in mind, I decided to share some of the stores I’ve found that promote the cultural heritage and motifs of traditional outfits.
€ - €€ Етно Стил / Ethno Style* - from plain t-shirts with added folk motifs to full blown traditional costumes, the website has a decent collection of items you can add to your daily wardrobe. (They also have socks!)
€ - €€ Българка / Bulgarka - ranging from trinkets, accessories, and simple t-shirts to dresses, tunics, scraves, and prints.
€ - €€€БългаранЪ / Balgaran - a website designed specifically to deliver Bulgarian-related items, such as handcrafted items, books, household objects, textbooks, clothing, board games, puzzles, cosmetics, and accessories of all sorts, all over the world. This might be the ideal online retailer for people living outside of the EU.
€ - €€€ Бабина Ракла / Grandmother’s Chest- a gift shop that offers products with traditional motifs, including jewelry, purses, wallets, scarves, t-shirts, and copper kitchenware. However, the t-shirts are not embroidered, they are printed. I would recommend the collection of scarves because they seem to have combined forces with Rose&Pepper, who previously only sold through Facebook.
€ - €€€ Стефи Стил / Stefi Style* - embroidered t-shirts, dresses, tunics, socks, and more! Mix and match or just get an individual item to suit your needs.
€ - €€€ Веникс / Venix - t-shirts, blouses, or full on outfits with embroidered traditional motifs. There’s also a “sailor” section since most of their stores are located on the Black Sea, and that’s another vibe they’re going for. Note: I have a shirt from here! It’s a very light, airy fabric and the embroidery is very delicate. The merchant told me it can be washed regularly in the laundry machine and that the white base fabric won’t stain from the colourful embroidery.
€ - €€€ Етно Шоп / Ethno Shop* - ceramics, pottery, textiles, including leather and hand-woven crafts, clothing such as t-shirts with stamped шевици, folk costumes, accessories, and even a wool yamurluk.
€€ Везба / Vezba- comfortable t-shirts, blouses, hoodies, hats, and more! You can browse by the type of item, colouration, or even the шевица used on the article of clothing - there’s a page dedicated to each where the anthropological analysis of each used shevitsa is available. Note: I have two t-shirts from here and the embroidery’s great, but the quality of the shirt itself is debatable. It’s definitely sturdy but it’s some kind of polyester-mix type of textile, so it’s very stretchy and comfortable but prone to smelling really, really badly after you wear it.
€ - €€ Караконджул / Karakondzul - ethno accessories, trinkets, repetition dance gear, small children’s folk outfits, and a focus on the tale of the karakondzul - a dark creature from Bulgarian folklore, similar to a deformed vampire. But these karakondzuli are different - they are kind, and seek to help humanity be pure of heart. Which is why they have adorable plushies with their likeness!
€ - €€€ Китна / Kitna - an online store with adorable souvenirs, gift ideas, and especially interesting knitted jewelry and other accessories with traditonal folk motifs. There are some clothing items such as 100% wool coats, but the primary products are trinkets and jewelry, and an adorable For Kids section that mainly includes pillows with illustrations.
€ - €€€ Чаршия / Charshia- an online shop that offers hand-made crafts, including items of clothing. They showcase the work of artisans who use the traditional methods of production to keep the traditional alive and kicking. You can build a full costume or buy individual items and use them as you please.
€ - €€€ Магазин Млъчков / Mlachkov Store* - provides a catalogue where you can find anything from socks to go with your traditional costume, to household textiles for an authentic Revival period house. Тhey sell authentic items, as well as newly produced - you can buy an antique scarf or gas lamp or whatever else you find.
€€ - €€€ Балкан фолк / Balkan Folk* - A store that offers traditional costumes, accessories, folk music CDs, and some souvenirs. The website itself also have a sweet retro vibe but it is fully operational and active. You can buy full costumes or separate elements.
bonus:Балкан фолк каталог / Balkan Folk catalogue - Balkan Folk also has a very detailed catalogue with full traditional costumes, including (Bulgarian) instructions on how to order the correct size without having to visit the atelier in person. I’d say this is an excellent art reference resource, too!
€€ - €€€ Светулка / Svetulka - a family business that embroiders modern clothes with traditional motifs, such as shirts, t-shirts, jackets, dresses, and more. They use exclusively natural materials like linen and cotton, though there might be a few exceptions somewhere on their website.
€€ - €€€ Аския / Askia*- ranges from t-shirts and dresses to traditional pieces that can be worn as a full costume or separately to have your desired look. Note: They use a different sizing to most other websites and brands, and it took asking about five times to be told what size would fit me. I kept asking “What sizes do you use? I need the equivalent of an S” and being told to measure myself… It was the most absurd email chain I’ve been a part of in a while and felt passive-aggressive, so I doubt they would be helpful if you need customer support.
€€€€ Везе / Veze - business casual to formal wear with a touch of tradition; with the option to have the item tailored to your size.
? Шевица / Shevitsa* - a company that specializes in hand-sewn textiles, and is open to doing custom orders. If you want to recreate the outfit you found in a museum or in a picture of your grandmother, they could give it a shot. Since they tailor everything and work from scratch, there are no listed prices.
? Етно Рай / Ethno Heaven* - a workshop based in Tryavna that works with custom orders, and has no listed prices. You can order a unique piece that’s your own take on any ethnographic region’s outfit or a costume fully in line with the traditional style you want to emulate.
websites marked with * offer full traditional costumes
“When Shelley’s corpse washed ashore, a friend identified it by a copy of Keats’s 1820 volume in the coat pocket, which he knew Shelley had taken with him. Then, after cremation in which Shelley’s heart, hardened by calcium, did not burn, this same friend snatched it from the embers and presented it to Mary Shelley, who kept it thereafter in her desk, wrapped in a copy of ‘Adonais.”
If your vision for the deradicalization of right-wing men begins and ends with “other men telling them that that’s gross and to stop it” then I’m sorry, you do not understand how masculinity works.
“Men who hold patriarchal status” and “men who are feminists” are two groups who overlap less than you want them to. I’m sorry. That’s not solely because men are so happy with patriarchal status that they don’t want to risk it by policing misogyny/queerphobia/racism, It’s because being misogynistic, queerphobic, and racist, end expressing other forms of toxic masculinity(and often abusively so) are part of how people establish and maintain patriarchal status. The men who have the ability to stop this via nothing but peer pressure are the very people who are doing it. That’s by design. And engaging in feminist intervention is, in and of itself, usually the abrupt end of that status and its associated power to persuade misogynistic men.
Like, I have worked in blue collar jobs as a notably queer person. It was pretty much a constant deluge of verbal abuse. In my experience, most blue collar work environments are exploitative, abusive, and bigoted, and very gleefully so. On the occasions I have spoken up about someone saying something that was super fucking out of line (asking me which of the girls walking by was hottest. We were installing a portable classroom at a middle school), believe it or not, they completely failed to be shamed! Because nobody else on the crew gave a fuck. *I* was the weird one. They ghosted me. A full blown company ghosted me. I suddenly didn’t have a job anymore because they just straightforwardly stopped telling me where the next job site was.
Like, this doesn’t mean that it’s your job to do it, but this vision you have of these big groups of men where everyone is on the fence and there is precisely one shit stirrer who can be shut down by a brave feminist man who can single handedly set the example for all these other guys…you are high. You are describing an “everybody clapped” level absurd scenario. Most of these truly virulent misogynistic guys either have zero friends, because, you know, our society is atomized to fuck, or they are in a group where the feminist guy is actually the weirdo who can be shut down and ostracized much, much easier than the misogynists, because there is no such thing as a man misogynists respect who stands up for women.
You might be saying “well, we’re talking about longstanding personal relationships, actually. Like, they need to have to want to spend time with you and then, as a side effect, you can mind control them out of being a threat to us.”
Problem with that being:
1: Many feminist men also have no friends, see the atomized society above.
2: Feminist men already stopped hanging out with men who make rape jokes because why the fuck would we want to spend time with them.
3: That isn’t just because we respect women so hard. We are in many cases talking about men who are also deeply queerphobic, heirarchical, violent and abusive to other men. What initially drew me to feminism and women was a lack of heirarchical squabbling and constant bullying, and the ability to be openly queer. A lot of men who came to feminism did so because they knew that the patriarchy was not a place they would find success or acceptance. These are not the men who are gonna be able to change right wing minds.
4. Men do not view themselves as a monolith. There is no universal brotherhood of men. The actual meaning of the term “Fragile masculinity” is that men are constantly expected to prove that they are deserving of the status of being a member of their own gender. There are large swathes of men–including most of the men who you’d look to as examples of good, feminist men who you want to undertake this project–who are considered failed men, sissies, f****ts, soyboys, ect. They are. Not. Going. To. Convince. These. Men. Of. Jack. Shit. Much less successfully *shame* them. Jesus.
I know all of this sucks. I know it would be cool to be able to just point at a group and have them be responsible for the work. But nah. It’s gonna have to be a societal project, one that will probably outlast all of us. Sorry. The thing you want these men to do is, absolutely, the morally correct thing to do. But presuming that it would be effective is, and once again I am so sorry about this, just ignorance of how these social groups function.
I think this sums up pretty well how come boys are becoming more and more right-wing and girls are becoming more feminists, generally speaking.
I fully understand why “character A is astounded at the sight of character B’s penis” is a specific kink that gets tagged for, but the fact that some platforms choose to tag this kink as “penis awe” is unintentionally very funny. Now I’m picturing penis experience kink tags for all those other allegedly transcendent emotions in the glossary of your Philosophy 101 textbook. Penis faith. Penis Weltschmerz. Penis apprehension of the absurd.
The existence of penis awe must therefore imply its antagonistic opposite, cock ennui.
