Souls In Clothes is made in Bulgaria, and that is not a marketing line. It is a geography, with a particular history, and a particular set of hands behind any piece of cloth you buy from us. Linen is not new here. Neither is embroidery, nor weaving, nor the long memory of a garment passed through a family.
I wanted to dedicate a post to three voices who are doing the quiet documentary work of keeping Balkan textile traditions visible — not as nostalgia, but as living practice.
Desislava Samichkova
Desislava Samichkova's A Stitch in Time treats Bulgarian embroidery as living heritage rather than museum artefact. That framing matters. The stitches she photographs and writes about were made by women who knew what they were doing, for garments that were worn. Keeping that knowledge in circulation — in language, in images, in working examples — is a quiet act of preservation. I find her work invaluable whenever I am thinking about collar details or the scale of a border.
Silvia Hara
Silvia Hara is a tapestry weaver in Bulgaria, and her practice is carried forward from her grandfather. That kind of direct lineage is not an abstraction. It is a loom in the same family for decades, with slightly different hands on it each generation. I think a lot about what gets kept and what gets lost between generations of craft, and watching a weaver who has chosen to keep going is a small lesson in how not to lose things.
Rositsa Hristova
Rositsa Hristova writes Bulgarianroots, an English-language blog about Bulgarian fabrics, traditional dress and textile heritage. Translation work is underrated. A lot of Bulgarian craft history has simply not been available to anyone outside the country, and that gap has real consequences for how the world thinks about Balkan cloth. Rositsa has been closing that gap, gently, for years. I am grateful for the archive she is building.
The linen dresses and tops we make at Souls In Clothes are not folk costume, but they sit in this same longer conversation — cloth that knows where it comes from, and hands that know what they are doing.