Daria Vasileva, currently living in Washington DC, USA, is a visual artist and fashion illustrator, with a special focus on people and fashion. In her artworks, Daria seeks to transcend the limits of fashion illustration, seamlessly transforming them into charming fashion portraits. Her unique style is influenced by classical art, concentrating on the portrayal of feelings and the beauty of the moment together with the depiction of individuals and their surroundings. Each painting tells a unique story. By utilizing figurative art, fashion, and decoration, Daria explores the intricate relationship between fashion and one’s individuality. She is driven by the desire to showcase fashion through her perspective by capturing the interaction between characters and fashion in everyday life, beyond fashion shows.

Hue&Eye recently interviewed her to discover more about what drove her to make art.

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Hello Daria! When or how have you understood you wanted to become an artist?

I have loved drawing since my childhood. It is very organic for me. But only a few years ago I decided to combine two of my passions: fashion and art and become a professional artist.

Can you briefly say something about your technique and tell us what drives you to make art?

Women and fashion are the two main themes of my artworks. I see myself as an artist whose paintings are elegant fashion illustrations, influenced by traditional art. What inspires me a lot is to show fashion through my perspective. Therefore, I capture characters in everyday situations. My paintings are stories, where either the fashion theme or the depicted character are both important as they support and complement each other.

All my artworks are painted in watercolors. I love this medium because I can achieve incredible transparency, and create a luminous and delicate effect that is unreachable with any other medium.

What is the main feature that has changed in your works or practice throughout the years?

I think the most important thing was the decision to follow my intuition to create with traditional mediums despite digital art trends and to establish my unique style as an artist.

Which artist primarily inspires your work? And is there something else, outside visual arts, that keeps you motivated?

I would say that Henry Matisse and Amedeo Modigliani inspire me a lot with their mastery of color and unique style. Also, artists like Helen Downie and Laura Laine whose artworks and aesthetics I admire a lot. They fill me with a desire to create. And of course fashion, as the art by itself, is to me an endless source of inspiration and reflection.

How would you like people to engage with your work?

I hope for my art to be perceived as a visual retreat to beauty and to evoke feelings of joy, happiness, and delight in my audience.

Spread the word! Do you have anything exciting on the horizon?

Recently I participated in art awards and competitions, where my works have received recognition. One was especially important to me since it is a well well-known award among fashion illustrators. For now, I am focused on the creative process and new ideas.

Go here to visit Daria’s website, or follow her on Instagram here >

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GUNIA Project is an Ukrainian brand of exceptional interior items & accessories focused on crafts and significant decor — it expands and rethinks traditional craftsmanship through effort and imagination. The founders are two Ukrainian designers, Natalia  and Maria Gavryliuk. 

Their main goal is to preserve Ukraine’s national values and tell the world about the country’s beauty in a modern way. Inspired by their ancestors’ deep and rich cultural heritage, Natalia and Maria produce ceramics, glass, homeware, and accessories.

The main philosophy of the brand is not to limit itself.

The brand wants to interpret the Ukrainian heritage in various forms and without boundaries.

For instance, they produce candles, sculptures, carpets, and jewelry. Also, Gunia creates educational content via social, shares information about artisanal crafts, and is planning to expand the variety of activities even more in the future.

The brand uses folk crafts to inspire and uses traditional culture to create designer products.

Ukrainian Heritage

Ukraine has a vast cultural potential, filled with rich traditions and cultural manifestations, regrettably mainly unfamiliar to most people.

Therefore, one of the main goals of Ukrainian brands is to spread accurate information about their national masterpieces, by overturning stereotypes and existing artificial perceptions. 

GUNIA Project is among the brands that aim to change the global views about our country formed in the past and show its new and modern present. From time immemorial, many stereotypes have gathered around Ukraine; GUNIA Project tries to influence human thoughts about Ukraine and change them.

The primary compass of the brand’s work is the modernization of art and giving a second life to those forgotten things and meanings. With its careful approach to resurrecting traditions in design, GUNIA Project develops a culture of caring for crafts, materials, and traditions, nurturing conscious consumption and emotional attachment to things.

About the Founders 

The founders and art directors of GUNIA Project — Natalia Kamenskaya and Maria Gavrilyuk worked together for a long time in the fashion industry and, in 2019, joined forces to create GUNIA Project.

The central vision drives the creative duo to create the future inspired by the best practices of the past and its modern interpretation. 

The first product released under the brand name was the Hutsul wool coat gunia, handmade in the Carpathians. It is in honor of this product that GUNIA Project got its name.

Artists

Ukraine has a rich and ancient culture of handicrafts, thanks to the country’s deep history and the artists that have entangled that account into their masterpieces with their own hands. GUNIA Project supports Ukrainian artisans and revives ancient Ukrainian techniques to uncover the underexplored world of Ukrainian craft for people interested in art and its roots and for aesthetic connoisseurs.

The search for artists specializing in rare techniques is a very responsible process. Still, the founders prepare carefully and never limit the purpose of the hunt because they often find even more than just talented people. They often find a perfect addition to the team, a fascinating story behind it, or an inspiration for the new collection.

Throughout the brand’s journey, the GUNIA Project team has worked with various techniques to produce multiple items. Among them are the guta glass, ceramics, gunia’s, and textile items.   

Tempered glass

One of the unique techniques is the production of Guta glass which then takes the form of artful homeware. It is traditionally made in the Carpathiansthe mountainous region in the Western part of Ukraine by a particularly unique method. Everything is done delicately by hand to create products of the proper shape, then color is added. 

It is worth noting that glass has its characteristics. Thus, it is quite challenging to work with, so the craftsmen can rightly call themselves true artists as they have a set of specific techniques and methods of manual processing of glass in a hot state that are pretty complicated to replicate.

Ceramics

Creating clay dishes or decorative items is a meticulous multi-step process into which artists invest all their knowledge and experience. In Ukraine, ceramic plates traditionally used by Ukrainian housewives were made by hand and decorated with hand-painted ornaments and patterns. GUNIA borrowed and adapted the idea to the modern world, producing items that can look great in the kitchen and when used as decor. 

Such dishes can become a true jewel in the house, adding a touch to the age-old experience of our ancestors. The GUNIA Project founders developed unique designs inspired by Ukrainian stained glass, antique towels, and Ukrainian folklore.

Gunia weaving

The most iconic thing for the brand is a traditional Hutsul fur coat called “gunia”, woven from sheared sheep’s wool called gunia. That’s where the brand name came from. 

Creating such a fur coat takes several weeks and is done exclusively by hand. Gunias were worn as work clothes when people tended to sheep in the mountains. The artists with exceptional technology and skills emphasize that making gunia beautiful and lush is vital. Every detail in this delicate work is essential, especially making yarns on ancient precious musical instruments using technologies passed down from older generations.

Textile

The founders’ release of the first collection of ornamented silk scarves by GUNIA Project was in 2018, inspired by Ukrainian embroidered towels of the XVIII century from the archives of the Ivan Honchar Museum.

The First Gunia Collection

When preparing the first collection, Maria and Natasha established an inevitable and close connection with other arts — painting, icons, woodwork, and ceramics. Scarves and bandanas of the brand made of silk and wool decorated with ornaments based on naive folk paintings or ceremonial holiday sewing are all handmade and stand out with a unique color palette.

Wickerwork

In Ukraine, there are whole villages where the main activity of the population is wickerwork. In ancient times, the entire family took part in this process. Each product is a unique creation that reflects the author’s mood, skill, and character. The method of wickerwork is truly magical, especially the special preparation of thin cane or whole vines for weaving. The artists make a basket with their own hands and put soul into each item, which usually takes a full day of hard work. 

GUNIA Project shows us repeatedly that everything created by the artists is always special and unique because it has its energy, history, and soul. Masterpieces of wickerwork, filled with vital content, could become a talisman for any home.

GUNIA Project is a brand that has absorbed traditions, customs, and artistic heritage and turned these masterpieces into contemporary elements of our lives. The high quality and personal character of each product are of the essence. 

Undoubtedly, the strength of each nation is in its original history, and those who emphasize and support this with their creativity, like GUNIA Project, deserve particular emphasis and admiration.

Discover all the collections and Shop on the Gunia Project website >

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While non-fungible tokens are up and rising, there’s still a quizzical for fashion brands and NFTs. 

Will fashion brands grow by NFTs? Questions on whether the young crypto wealthy public will be inspired by luxury fashion NFTs and what they will look like are starting to settle.

As for today, while stories of NFTs record sales continue to break the news, the fashion world still sits quietly. The truth is, fashion brands are starting to studying blockchain creativity and business opportunities.

The question is just who will pull the trigger first, says Marjorie Hernandez, founder of Lukso, a blockchain platform for fashion and digital lifestyle. Hernandez takes over the urge for fashion brands to keep ahead of the e-commerce trend, hence the enthusiasm to experiment with new technologies like blockchain.

As anything digital can be turned into a unique NFT with its ownership recorded on a digital ledger or blockchain from art to music, people in the fashion world are starting to ask themselves what they can do in the NFT space. 

Proponents claim that NFTs’ scarcity and ability to accrue value can bring digital fashion closer to authentic fashion. Last March, Burberry luxury fashion brand has designed outfits for one of China’s biggest video games – for which players can buy the clothes – known as skins – to adorn in-game characters.

The current Fashion NFTs attitude.

 At the moment, though, NFT fashion still has an artistic over the commercial appeal. Brands can currently sell NFTs as GIFs which have limited usage for the buyers. The current fashion NFT user experience requires the luxury fashion shine that is presently replaced by a virtual gaming offer, as on the virtual platform Decentraland, where players can buy fashion NFTs to inhabit their avatars. On Decentraland, we encounter various marketplaces holding real-world brands, although the outfits are cartoonish and pixelated. More further, the annoyance of setting up a browser-based Ethereum wallet is not appealing to luxury fashion brand buyers.

Things are yet to change.

Recently, Neuno CEO Natalie Johnson, a new platform for digital fashion collectibles and wearables to buy, collect, wear or trade and sell on the Flow Blockchain, says things are at a turning point.

They are working with a social media platform specializing in filters, so the owner will post a photo of themselves ‘wearing’ the dress. Furthermore, they are also working with one of Asia’s biggest games to make it possible to dress their gaming avatar in the outfit. The buyer will need to buy the NFT once to use it in multiple different ways.

Neuno only works directly with brands to ensure a premium user experience and authenticity. Also, the buyer may pay with credit cards to exclude the need to own cryptocurrency. 

Fashion NFTs as digital collectibles

Many smaller brands and retailers have already hopped into the NFT game in various creative ways and are selling fashion NFTs on marketplaces like OpenSea, Nifty Gateway, and KnownOrigin.

For example, Clothia – a US online retailer in the accessible luxury department, applies NFTs as a digital counterpart of a real-life garment by auctioning NFT dresses. The winning bidders will receive the analogous real-life dresses. Also, both the NFTs and the physical garments are one-of-a-kinds.

Clothia also became the first established fashion business to launch a community-driven cryptocurrency known as $Cloth. 

The real opportunity is that one may now create all kinds of digital couture looks that could never exist in real life, says Amber Jae Slooten, co-founder of The Fabricant, a digital fashion house. They recently ran a 3D fashion design competition in collaboration with Adidas and Karlie Kloss’s nonprofit, Kode With Klossy. The top 20 submissions were then auctioned as NFTs. They were on display in a gallery in Decentraland. This way, visitors inhabiting avatars could view the artwork and bid on the designs virtually. 

The winning design netted 1.4 ETH, about $2,400 at current exchange rates. Proceeds from the auction went directly to the featured artists. The voluntary contributions instead supported new events and programming for Kode With Klossy’s alumni community of more than 5,000 scholars.

Not bad for now!

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