From Ancestral Garments to the Podium: the Transformation of National Costume in Contemporary Fashion

This article examines the transformation of Uzbek national costume its fabrics, silhouettes and ornamental vocabulary into contemporary fashion design, situating the Central Asian case within the broader international discourse on ethnic dress, national identity and sustainable fashion. Uzbekistan possesses one of the richest surviving hand-textile traditions in Eurasia, embodied in silk ikat fabrics such as atlas, adras, bekasam and baxmal, and in the symbolically dense embroidery of suzani. Over the past two decades these elements have migrated from ceremonial wardrobes and ethnographic collections onto international runways and into the collections of both Uzbek and foreign designers. The findings indicate three parallel processes: the technical and economic revival of endangered hand-weaving crafts through fashion-industry demand; the semantic transformation of protective and fertility-related ornament into decorative, largely secularised print; and the uneven distribution of symbolic and economic capital between Western luxury houses and Central Asian artisans.