Sixteen weavers and a 22 m² studio: FashionUnited on where Lithuanian fashion comes from

Does heritage sell? FashionUnited put the question to Lithuanian designers and found that tradition gives them a story, but what travels abroad is origin and a very good linen.

When the fashion trade outlet FashionUnited visited Vilnius, it started in a 22-square-metre studio. There, designer Inga Skripka described how a box of her late grandmother’s textiles sent her around Lithuania for almost a year, looking for the last weavers. She found sixteen, most of them women born in the 1930s who can only be reached by landline. One of them, 91-year-old Verutė, still works at a wooden loom. Each garment in Skripka’s third collection carries a QR code leading to a video of the women who wove its fabric.

Vilnius appears in the story again and again. With a home market of about 2.8 million people, local designers look abroad by default, and Vilnius Fashion Week, revived in 2025 after a 25-year pause, aims to give them an international stage. In the city’s University Botanical Garden, textile artist Gintarė Murauskienė invited 50 knitters to create a field of mohair flowers, a way of showing how the fading of traditional crafts echoes the disappearance of rare plants. In FashionUnited’s account, Vilnius is where the thread is being picked up again: in a small studio, in a botanical garden, on a fashion week stage that is back after 25 years.