Why Lithuanian designers are leaning on heritage, and what sells abroad

There are not many designers who invest a year of their time sourcing the right fabrics, but that's exactly what Inga Skripka did. A creator and founder of her eponymous line, she spent close to a year travelling across her home country of Lithuania looking for weavers. "I was looking for the footprints and initials of our folklore, remaining Lithuanian traditions," she says to FashionUnited in her 22-square-meter studio in Vilnius.

Almost none of the women she encountered were still working. Most were born in the 1930s, with no presence on social media, and could only be reached via landlines. But Skripka found that saying she was interested in their weaving was usually more than enough to be invited in. "I want to tell their stories, the history and the weight behind weaving." Verutė was the exception. At 91, she is among the last still working a traditional wooden loom. She wove for a living all her life and weaves now mostly to fill the days. She would be glad, Skripka says, if people still bought woven fabrics the way they once did.

Skripka began her search after finding a box of woven textiles made by her late grandmother. Only after her death did she understand what her grandmother had made, and what it connected her to: a relic of another time that not many older Lithuanians wanted anything to do with. Under the former Soviet rule, there was almost no production allowed into the country from the West, so households made a great deal of items themselves, and "the generation that came before us somehow hated all those fabrics," Skripka says. But she felt a different connection with them and set out to actualise the fabrics in the only language she knew: "I turned them into garments," she says, holding up a matching set.

A year spent looking for Lithuania's last weavers

Her first collection, made in 2019 from her grandmother’s fabrics, found an audience she did not expect, namely the youth. Inspired by their interest, she began collecting more fabrics, which is when the scale of the problem became clear. She had initially expected to find plenty of weavers still making fabrics in the country, but "it's actually a dying art," she says. Speaking to a total of 16 elderly weavers in the end, she created an archive of fabrics and the stories behind them. She is acutely aware that the archive is finite, and uses every scrap of fabric, making hats and accessories from smaller pieces.

Many of the weavers were surprised she wanted to buy from them at all. "Nobody really appreciates the fabrics in their own villages," she says, especially when money changed hands for something they made. The third collection includes documentation about Skripka's project, a form of storytelling, in each garment. Every piece features a QR code to a video of the women who wove the fabric, so buyers can learn more about the collection's heritage and hopefully feel a sense of national pride, she adds. Interest in handicrafts in Lithuania is certainly growing. Whether there is the capacity to meet it at any commercial scale is another question.

Lithuanian fashion: a small market looking outward

Lithuanian designers from Urtė Katiliūtė and Juozas Statkevičius to Agnė Kuzmickaitė and Kęstutis Rimdžius have all made a deliberate international push regarding their brands. With a domestic market of approximately 2.8 million people, it makes sense, as such a small market cannot support or sustain an established brand. It's why Vilnius Fashion Week, revived in 2025 after a 25-year hiatus, is also focusing on giving its national designers an international platform to showcase their work.

For designers hailing from a country of that size, tapping into your cultural heritage can serve as an obvious differentiator. But to what extent is it a commercial asset? Is it Lithuanian tradition and handicraft that sells abroad, or is it the fact that something was made in Lithuania?

Weaving: the craft that lacks successors in Lithuania

The lack of weavers in Lithuania is consistent across disciplines. Liepa Marija Gradauskaitė, a designer who makes sculptural furniture from Lithuanian wicker, estimates that around 200 weavers once worked under the production collectives of the Soviet era. Between 20 and 30 are alive today, and hardly any still weave, she tells FashionUnited over coffee. Her own wicker supplier, a former weaver himself, stepped out of the craft altogether and went into growing willow as demand for weavers declined. Gradauskaitė only took up the technique after a teacher encouraged her to try it and has spent the past years learning the ins and outs of working with the natural material. Asked why she chose to pursue a declining craft, she replies: "To show the world that we exist, and we make beautiful, unique things here."

Textile artist Gintarė Murauskienė, who works under the pseudonym Knitomanija, reflects that decline in her latest project. Named "Nykstančios rūšys" (Endangered Species), the project exhibition opened at Vilnius University's Botanical Garden in Vingis Park last month and places the loss of traditional hand-knitting alongside the disappearance of plants listed in Lithuania's Red Data Book. For the project, Murauskienė invited 50 knitters from her community to come together and knit a field of flowers, replicating a protected native perennial out of mohair. "I chose mohair because it is a fluffy yarn, and that sort of mimics the silky hairs of the flowers," she tells FashionUnited in Vilnius's Botanical Gardens.

Murauskienė prefers natural yarns when making her exhibitions and personal creations. "I think we have enough polyester," she says, noting that as an independent creator she can choose what she works with and pay a premium for better, more sustainable fibers, unlike large brands and retailers who have to keep the overhead in mind. Lithuania has its own wool types and sheep breeds, she adds, which offer a different set of stories to tell. Producing the yarn is another matter: a local spinner, a friend of hers, recently mentioned in a fit of fury that she was going to burn her spinning wheel, because the work and effort that goes into traditional spinning is no longer worth it. That calculation, whether the hours spent are worth the return, is the same one that eventually caught up to a brand built on those hours.

Just take a look at The Knotty Ones. A luxury Lithuanian knitwear brand, originally founded in 2014 by three friends, it explicitly built its brand name and reputation on Lithuanian heritage knitting, working with more than 40 knitters who worked from their homes in the rural countryside. In 2023, the Knotty Ones closed a €250,000 bridge round from Coinvest Capital, aiming to use the money to fund its growth and expansion to the US. But less than three years later, it appointed Hilco to oversee a potential sale, after struggling with a decline in consumer spend and difficulty accessing investment capital, which hit performance.

Murauskienė was midway through work on her latest project when she heard the news. Friends with the owners, the Prussian blue flowers in the installation were made by The Knotty Ones knitters. "It is hard to make a decent living, and in the end running operations was too expensive for them," she says. It is also why Murauskienė does not have any aspirations to open a store or to produce and sell collections. "When you try to scale and sell, things could end like the Knotty Ones," she says. Instead, she'd rather open a studio or workshop somewhere in Vilnius, to serve as a community center, where knitters can gather together and share their love of creating. "When you make something with your own hands, you enjoy it for longer. You don't throw it away after one or two seasons. You can keep it for 10, 20 years, as a family heirloom. It's quite normal to have a sweater for that long when it's very good quality." The Lithuanian brands that do have international reach are not selling tradition. They are selling linen.

Linen: the fabric that sells everywhere

"Linen is a distinctive fiber, and we know how to work with it, while the world is still interested in it," says Vaida Ribinskaitė, co-founder of slow-fashion label Son de Flor, to FashionUnited over lunch. Together with her sister Indrė, the two founded the brand in 2017, and Ribinskaitė admits that they never set out to create a linen brand. "When we started our brand, it was very organic. It's not that we had a business plan saying, 'Okay, we will make timeless dresses from linen.' Rather, we just wanted to make a timeless dress." The first dress they made, inspired by one their mother favoured, was actually made from cotton. But once she realized that Lithuania was home to very strong linen manufacturers, things clicked. In addition to her brand, Ribinskaitė lists Not Perfect Linen and MagicLinen among the other Lithuanian brands with an international following. "It's probably easier to go through linen to reach the global fashion stage than through just some very cool design," she says with a laugh.

Son de Flor's advantage is more industrial rather than cultural. Ribinskaitė mentions three producers of scale in the country exporting. Her own supplier is just fifteen minutes away from the Son de Flor office in Kaunas. Around 20 people work for the brand, seven of them in production, with a partner sewing house also in Kaunas. Nothing is dropshipped. Son de Flor's proximity to its suppliers is a commercial tool as much as it is a nod to the brand's roots. It lets the brand launch small and react fast to what sells. At the same time, it also lets its customers respond to what they like and what they don't. When Son de Flor tested alternative linen sourced abroad on a handful of styles last year, the brand's loyal community quickly noticed the difference. "No, this isn't the linen we know and like. Why don't you go back?" They could tell straight away, so the brand reversed the decision and took the financial hit.

A Lithuanian brand through and through, one would think that Son de Flor has a large following in the country, but most of its clients are international. Lithuania itself is barely a market for the brand at all. The United States accounted for roughly 60 percent of sales before last year's tariff changes and now sits closer to 40 percent, a drop severe enough that there were months when Ribinskaitė questioned if they would be able to pay everyone at the end of the month. "This year we've been very focused on basically getting our feet back on the ground, and we managed to do that," she adds.

One aspect that has helped this is how Ribinskaitė sees the brand and its label. "When we started, we had discussions about whether we should say 'Made in Lithuania.' Back then we thought people would think: what is Lithuania? Some third country? What's the quality?" But now, close to a decade on, she is learning to be proud of that label. Her sense of national pride is in part thanks to the country's own marketing and a broader turn away from fast fashion.

The brand is growing in key European markets like Germany, France and the UK, but Ribinskaitė is well aware of the ceiling. Linen as a fabric does not wear out quickly, which makes it, in her words, "too slow for the pace of the economy." Brands like Son de Flor that built their identity around it are unlikely to scale fast, but it is not a constraint that she is looking to avoid. "Maybe linen isn't meant to scale," she muses.

Ribinskaitė does not dream of becoming an international conglomerate, nor tripling her business within a year. But if one day, Son de Flor would consider relocating its production to India or anywhere else abroad to continue expanding, it would not be a decision they'd make lightly. She would only do so with full transparency and communication to their community on what is changing and why. "Every brand probably starts with good intentions," she says. "Then maybe they get some venture capital, other people come in, you have different visions, and sometimes your dream is no longer really yours."

A question of capacity, not interest

What drives Lithuania fashion abroad is provenance. Linen, local production, the label on the collar. The preservation of traditional handicrafts has yet to translate abroad in a similar manner, largely because there is not enough to scale. Part of that may be linked to an obstacle closer to home, Gradauskaitė notes. Following its independence from the Soviet Union in 1990, it remains difficult for people to separate what is authentically Lithuanian from what was imposed, which leaves the country with a complicated relationship to its own past. "Sometimes it's hard to even get people's attention to look at the old crafts, old traditions," she notes.

Her answer to solving this is not just preservation or the continual practice of these handicrafts. "To really keep something alive, you have to embrace the changes, maybe even push it a little bit." Skripka, Gradauskaitė and Murauskienė are each doing that in their own way, and a younger group of creators is following them into weaving, knitting and upcycling, at fairs and as a hobby - but to date, none of it is enough to fully supply a brand.