If there is one person in Bulgaria who knows how to fashion hats to every taste and size, that person is designer Irina Sardareva. Irina is not Bulgarian, she was born in Kiev but fate brought her to this country where she found a home and where she has for many years been a successful fashion designer.
“It was love that brought me to Bulgaria,” she says. “I fell in love with a man from Bulgaria who was studying civil aviation in Kiev. I went on a date instead of a friend and that was how I met Petar. When I came to Bulgaria back in 1978 I was a third year student. I graduated microbiology, but as it turned out, there were no jobs to be had as a microbiologist in Bulgaria then. I had two sons and once they got older I started teaching chemistry at a school in Sofia. I was a teacher for ten years and it gave me great pleasure – I think teaching is a wonderful profession. Children give a teacher much more than a teacher can give children. However, there came a time when things took a different turn - I have always loved fashion and fashion design. I used to sow, embroider, knit, I conducted history of fashion classes at school. It was then that my husband was laid off. So I said – I quit and I will start a new life. That was back in 1992, and we decided to start on something of our own. We had some money and we started our own business. Together with my husband we set up a fashion house and we called it PIGAS – an abbreviation of the names of my family’s members – Petar, Irina, Georgy and Alexander Sardarev.
The company manufactured and sold ladies’ hats – something that had always been a hobby of mine. Accessories were something that had always been scarce in Bulgaria. I looked up the Museum of History of Sofia and I found out that prior to 1940 there had been 18 hat studios in the capital; in Rousse there were 35. Women in Bulgaria had definitely had a taste for accessories. But in 1946 a law against profiteering came out and it targeted bankers, MPs and hat-makers. So hat-makers started making clothes, many of them burnt their models, so hat-making declined.
Irina Sardareva’s first models were invariably used as accessories to the collections of the foremost Bulgarian designers. In 1994 she started making fashion reviews of her own, so the clothes became accessories to her hats. Her name became a hallmark, her hat reviews - unorthodox fashion shows. In 1997, she set up her own House of Hats, where she makes and sells her accessories.
“There are hats for each person and for each occasion,” Irina Sardareva says. “Some are for every-day wear, for the people who like walking; others are for people who drive around the city. We have everyday, holiday, cocktail hats. Wearing a hat is always like giving the world a wink, it is a discovery one makes about one’s style. A woman with a hat is a self-assured woman, who wants to show her own unique self to the world.”
In March 2013, the Academy of Fashion awarded Irina Sardareva her first Golden Needle in the new “Accessories” category. Since 2005 the designer has also been manufacturing ladies’ knitwear. Irina Sardareva’s clothes and accessories have been highly successful at fashion shows in Dubai, Kuwait, USA and Paris. But what is her life like outside the world of fashion?
“I have two granddaughters and one grandson. They are my greatest joy, because I am a successful mother and a successful grandmother. My granddaughter has been showing a keen interest in what I do. She has her own work space and she says “I work for Granny”. I would like to wish myself health and many years of professional life, because the meaning of life is to do what you want to do and give people pleasure. That is what I do and I want to continue doing for at least another 20 years. I feel wonderful in Bulgaria; I’d say my coming here is no accident, because there is a fate of sorts guiding us. I have been successful because I have not resisted fate. I accepted Bulgaria such as it is, and I love it.”
English version: Milena Daynova
