Nastia
Vova
Sobakovych the dog
Original kimonos of hand-dyed natural fabrics that complement character and personality
A family workshop of unconventional kimonos.
Form. Color. Character.
Form. Color. Character.
Choose your kimono
We feel very close to Asian aesthetics: loose, long garments that give you room to show yourself. We love the feeling that clothes like these let a little more of you come through.
That is exactly what a kimono means to us. You choose a color that matches your mood, character or state of mind, and the piece becomes an extension of you. It helps bring out what usually stays deep inside.
Form
Texture
Color
A form for
our pace
of life
We deliberately don’t recreate the classic Japanese kimono. It belongs to another culture with its own history, traditions and meanings, and we treat it with respect. What inspires us is the idea of the form itself, so we adapted it to our way of life and mindset, making the kimono both a beautiful look and clothing you can live in every day.
Sleeves.
We made them comfortable for everyday wear.
Pockets.
We added pockets, and our pieces have plenty of them.
Unisex.
Almost everything we make is as versatile as it gets.
Form
Texture
Color
The beauty of imperfection
We work with natural fabrics and obsess over how they will turn out.
Texture
Wear resistance
Density and quality
Color retention
Colorfast after dyeing
We love raw edges, unevenness and worn spots, as well as things that look as if they already have a story of their own even when new. We feel close to the wabi-sabi aesthetic, which sees beauty in the imperfect and the alive, so for us a piece only gains character from the marks of time. That is exactly why we don’t aim for every kimono to be an exact copy of the previous one.
Form
Texture
Color
Every shade passes through our hands
It’s not enough for us to take fabric in a color someone else has already invented and offered to the market. We want to decide for ourselves what each shade will be, so we dye many of our fabrics by hand. Dyeing is one of the most important stages of making a piece: it takes time and attention, and every time it gives a slightly different result.
Thanks to this approach, the shade of your kimono may differ slightly from the photo or from a piece in the previous batch. And for us that’s the whole thrill, because your piece will be yours alone.
Process
How
is a
kimono
born?
01
Cutting
We cut every piece in the workshop and build comfortable sleeves and pockets right into the pattern — our pieces have plenty of them.
02
Sewing
We sew together with our assistant seamstresses and leave raw edges wherever they add character to a piece.
03
Dyeing
Sometimes we re-dye a piece to get exactly the right shade.
04
Checking
We look at how the fabric behaves after all the stages.
05
Refining
If we don’t like the result, we change it.
You can try things on in our workshop — we don’t have a separate showroom. This is where we work, dye fabrics, come up with new pieces, talk, rest and spend a huge part of our lives, so the place is very personal to us, almost sacred.
Some finished pieces are always in the workshop. But not every model, color and size is in stock all the time, so we recommend messaging us first to arrange a visit.
Arrange a visit
We are the ones behind the site
From the outside BARVA may sometimes look like a big company, but inside it’s a very human process. We mostly answer messages ourselves, Nastia and Vova, and the site, the photos and the page are run by our small team — no faceless managers and no big warehouse.
The “payment — product — delivery” scheme is too little for us. What matters to us is normal, mutually respectful communication from the first message to the finished piece.
Why we may say no
Every kimono passes through our hands long before it reaches yours.
Sometimes we turn down an order if we feel that we and the customer see the process very differently. Orders are necessary and important to us, but BARVA means more to us than clothes and sales. Every piece keeps the imprint of our time, hands, energy and the place where it was made, and it matters to us not to lose that feeling. We say this calmly, without resentment or pretension, because we truly care who we sew for.
And yes,
we want
more
We love the small, crafty side of BARVA, but what we already have is not enough for us. We want to grow, create more, experiment with new fabrics, colors and forms, release new collections and send our kimonos to every corner of the world.
That’s why we made this site. Here it’s easier to see everything we create, choose the model, color and length, place an order and find all the information in one place — and, along with it, the very kimono that will be about you.
Go to catalog
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