Dare To Dream

As War In The Ukraine Rages On, Native Designer Julia Paskal Uses Fashion To Convey Love, Dreams And Hope For The Future

- Jamie Lee

In the film Mrs Harris Goes To Paris which is set in the 1950s, a cleaning lady in London who lost her husband to the war dreams of owning a Dior haute couture dress. She sets off for the French capital, and meets the director of Dior who denies her entry into the closed-off, wealthy world of fashion. When asked how she would give the Dior gown the life it deserves, the protagonist responds, “It’s my dream.”

Fashion is often seen by the outsider as vapid and shallow. Yet, it is also a repository of dreams, allowing many of us to aim high and take a step forward even in the toughest of times. This is certainly the case for 33-year-old fashion designer Julia Paskal, who started her eponymous label in 2013.

Paskal was raised in Odesa, Ukraine by a family of scientists, where her upbringing helped widen her perspective of the world. She was initially attracted to architecture, so much so that she moved to Kyiv to study for a degree in it at the National University of Construction and Architecture. During her time there, Paskal collaborated with her university friends to make clothes to wear to parties, slowly expanding her creative boundaries and building a relationship between architecture and fashion. “Architecture shaped my mind and gave me an understanding of colour, composition and construction which I can apply to a garment or product design — but in a soft and sensitive way.”