Kyiv City

Kyiv embroidery is best known for the Brocard, or "soap", style: red and black floral cross-stitch patterns whose charts came packed with soap at the end of the 19th century. Kyiv and the Right Bank launched the style, and it spread further than any other local tradition.

The pattern most people picture when they hear the word "vyshyvanka" came to the village together with a bar of soap.

This is the story that started today's mass-market vyshyvanka. Kyiv and the Right Bank set it in motion at the end of the 19th century.

Soap embroidery: where the Kyiv vyshyvanka came from

At the end of the 19th century the Parisian perfumer Henri Brocard, who worked in the Russian Empire, came up with an idea together with his wife Charlotte Rouvet: put printed embroidery charts into soap packaging. Every buyer received a chart.

The soap was sold as "folk" soap, and it really did become affordable for peasants, the largest part of the population at the time. Along with the soap, a ready-made design came into the home, and all that remained was to transfer it onto linen.

Hence the style's second name - soap embroidery. The first, Brocard embroidery, comes from the manufacturer's surname.

Why the style spread across the whole country

A chart from a wrapper did not have to be invented, adapted or learned from one's mother. It could simply be copied, and that decided everything.

Technically, cross-stitch also proved easier than nyz, cutwork or white satin stitch: it does not demand such precise thread counting. That is why the embroidery of Kyiv and the Right Bank spread further than any other local tradition.

The geography is telling: the style was most popular in the Kyiv, Poltava, Cherkasy and Chernihiv regions. In Western Ukraine it was hardly known, because until 1939 those lands belonged to other states where Brocard soap was not sold.

Why museums long refused to collect it

There is a detail that is rarely mentioned. For decades museums practically did not collect items with this embroidery, considering it foreign and lacking roots in folk tradition.

The situation changed only in the 1970s, when pieces in the "Brocard" style began arriving from expeditions at the Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art in Kyiv. Scholarly study came even later: the phenomenon was first described in depth by Tetiana Kara-Vasylieva and the Belarusian researcher Volha Labacheuskaya.

In other words, what is now seen as the most typical Ukrainian vyshyvanka was, half a century ago, considered unworthy of a museum shelf. The Kyiv vyshyvanka of this type went from a despised novelty to a national symbol in less than a hundred years.

Kyiv embroidery ornament: the motifs

Common motifs include stars, flowers and bunches of grapes. The grape belongs specifically to the Brocard group: a plant ornament worked in cross-stitch.

Interpretations of the motifs differ between studies, and some meanings exist only in oral tradition. We distinguish between what is documented and what is passed down by tradition, and we do not present a guess as fact.

A 1912 publication contains photographs of girls and women of the Kyiv region in festive dress, and their shirts are decorated with Brocard embroidery. So by the early 20th century the Kyiv embroidery ornament was already seen as festive rather than as a novelty from a wrapper.

The colours of Kyiv embroidery

Red and black are the basis. A shirt from the first half of the 20th century from the village of Kodaky near Kyiv, held by the Ivan Honchar Museum, is embroidered in exactly these two colours.

The older layer had colours of its own: on the right bank of the Kyiv region, white-on-white embroidery and threads of a complex ochre colour dyed in oak bark have survived. So the red and black pair is the youngest in the history of Kyiv embroidery.

What the Kyiv region had before Brocard

The region is not uniform and divides into several ethnographic zones. The north, Polissian in character, keeps old geometric techniques in red and black. The Left Bank is technically closer to the Chernihiv and Poltava regions. The Right Bank produced the Brocard line.

So the Polissian geometry from the north of the same region is older than the Brocard flowers. Prevalence and age are different things, and they should not be confused.

The city itself has no separate embroidery tradition and relies on the Kyiv region tradition, above all the right-bank one. That is why Kyiv embroidery ornament has at least two layers: an older Polissian one and a later Brocard one.

Where to see vyshyvankas in Kyiv

The largest specialist collection is the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Decorative Art on the grounds of the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra. It is there that Brocard pieces, previously ignored, began to arrive from the 1970s.

The second important venue is the National Museum of Folk Architecture and Life in Pyrohiv, where folk dress is shown in the context of the home and everyday life rather than behind glass.

The difference between these two collections is fundamental. The first shows embroidery as an object of art, the second as part of everyday life. For the Brocard style, which was born in everyday life, the second context is often more telling.

The factory that embroidered for the whole country

The Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Production and Art Association, reorganised from an artel in 1960, had about 2,000 employees according to art historian A. Varyvonchyk, and in the 1960s-1980s produced embroidered blouses, men's shirts, rushnyky and embroidered clothing exported to the USA, Canada and Japan. For more than 30 years the association's chief artist was Nataliia Hrechanovska (born 1926), who together with the outstanding embroiderer Hlykeriia Tsybulova created collections of mass-market clothing in the late 1950s based on the traditions of Ukrainian dress.

In the association's products, according to Varyvonchyk, red always dominated, reinforced by black and sometimes yellow and blue. A small touch of black in the centre of a "star", a fine backstitch over the design and an outline around the main motif gave the ornament restraint and clarity. Embroiderer Liubov Hordynna refined zanyzuvannia, and Raisa Horbach reinterpreted the nabyruvannia technique. In 2004 the association ceased to exist, and most of its collections, drawings and samples were lost.

The Kyiv shirt at the Dihtiari workshop school

Hlykeriia Tsybulova (1896-1990) from Baryshivka was an instructor at the Zemstvo teaching and model workshop school in Dihtiari in the Chernihiv region, where girls from the Poltava, Chernihiv and Kyiv governorates studied. Each pupil had to embroider and sew herself a shirt the way it was made in her home area, so the school gathered samples from all over Ukraine.

According to Varyvonchyk, the pupils' "Kyiv" shirts had three-colour bands of geometric ornament on the sleeves worked in nabyruvannia, dense small black-and-red patterns with eight- and four-pointed stars in satin stitch or cross-stitch, while carnations, oak leaves with acorns, bunches of grapes and guelder rose clusters were scattered over the sleeve in a chequered order or arranged in wavy vertical branches.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a separate city style?

No, Kyiv has no embroidery tradition of its own as a city. Kyiv vyshyvankas draw on the tradition of the surrounding region: the older Polissia geometry from the north and the later Brocard line of the right bank.

Is Brocard embroidery genuinely Ukrainian?

Yes, although it is not the oldest. The style arrived at the end of the 19th century with the charts in Brocard soap packets, but it changed within folk culture for more than a century, and by the early 20th century such shirts were festive dress in the Kyiv region. Museums only began collecting these pieces in the 1970s.

Why red and black?

This pair of colours was on the printed charts and turned out to be the cheapest to work. Older Kyiv embroidery also relied on white on white and on ochre threads dyed with oak bark.

Where can I read more?

The most thorough accounts of Brocard embroidery are by Tetiana Kara-Vasylieva and the Belarusian researcher Volha Labacheuskaya. The sources this page relies on are listed in the "Sources" section below.

Who created the vyshyvankas of the Kyiv Shevchenko factory?

For more than 30 years the chief artist of the Taras Shevchenko Kyiv Production and Art Association was Nataliia Hrechanovska, who worked together with embroiderer Hlykeriia Tsybulova. The association's products were exported to the USA, Canada and Japan, and in 2004 it ceased to exist.

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