Unquiet
Things

I am getting to this a little late (everyone else probably saw this already over a month ago) but in addition to this blog being a place to share things with you, it’s also a memory book of things for me. And this collection is worth remembering!

I have been carrying The Transylvania Chronicles around with me since ABODI released it earlier this year — not unlike the Castle Bag itself, which is to say: a vessel for haunted imaginations, strange dreams, and whatever it is that makes certain people feel more at home in the dark.

Led by creative director Dora Abodi, the brand has always operated less like a fashion house and more like what she herself calls “a boundless imaginary republic,” and this collection is exactly that, governed by ancient creatures, Transylvanian mythology, and a very particular, very beautiful kind of strangeness.

The photographs, shot by Szilveszter Makó with an art direction that sits somewhere between studio portraiture and mythological documentation, are the kind of images you might find in a weird storybook, high on a shelf, hidden from young little hands. Model Ursula Wångander shapeshifts through a gallery of dark archetypes — Elisabeth Báthory, Dracula, spectral ghosts, the Cat Mermaid, the elusive water vila — each one presented as if suspended within a painting rather than a photograph. The overhead shots, especially those of models arranged against illustrated sets like figures in a darkly illuminated manuscript, create an incredible, uncanny paper-doll effect.

The garments themselves are extraordinary. The Chronicles dress is ornamented with Abodi’s own paintings, a non-linear visual diary of childhood memories, myths, and history drifting through enchanted forests, blue-painted Secler houses, folk dancers, wandering ghosts, the vampire prince, the blood queen — an entire mythology compressed into fabric.

The Landscape of Dreams coat is made from hand-woven antique hemp, fully hand-painted, then patchworked and three-dimensionally applied with figures and shapes through what Abodi describes as a long meditative painting process followed by intuitive assembly. It is explicitly, emphatically impossible to recreate.The Bokály Dress reimagines the iconic ceramic vessel of the Székelys of Transylvania,  a piece whose graceful curves and richly ornamented surfaces carry centuries of folk tradition,  into living woven form. And there is antique broderie anglaise lace described in the collection notes as “delicate as breath, yet carrying centuries within its threads,” the collection’s mythology embedding itself even into the perforations of the fabric: it is said that Elisabeth Báthory once stared into such lace and saw the shadow of her own destiny unfolding in its fragile tracery.

Speaking of Báthory — she is a central figure here, reinterpreted not as monster but as symbol of demonized female power, a woman feared for her refusal to submit. And the collection’s notes offer one of the more quietly devastating framings of her story: Báthory was afraid of mirrors. They reflected reality, and the slow vanishing of youth. Her face had become a diary of the past, and she could not bear it.

Meanwhile, across the collection’s mythology, Dracula was magnetic with dark authority, younger, stronger, at the peak of his power, and yet could never enjoy his own face, because mirrors showed him nothing. We are all lured by what we don’t have, and blind to what we do. I had to think on that for a while, and when it finally settled, it felt less like a moral and more like a key,  the thing that unlocks both of them at once, their particular hungers, their particular blindnesses.

Then there is Artefact 2, a padded, scalloped-silhouette oversized jacket, and in the presentation, when it was worn, bats took flight from within its sculptural folds. A soft cavern stitched from memory, opening its wings.

And then there is the Castle Bag!!. A black sculptural bag inspired by Dracula’s Castle, retailing for around €850, which I would kinda maybe consider? I would consider it. One Reddit commenter said they would sell a kidney for it, and I don’t think that’s entirely hyperbolic. It began as a headpiece created with no commercial intention at all, total imaginative freedom, and only became a bag after Jaden Smith wore the original to the Grammys, and it went viral.  But for real, the only piece from this collection within actual reach is the Cat Mermaid socks, and at $112 a pair, can buy does not equal should buy. I am choosing to experience this particular desire from a respectful distance!

There is a quote from Abodi that I keep returning to: she describes the ambition of ABODI Transylvania as the establishment of an autonomous and creative domain where her legendary creatures (including myself, she writes) can freely create and feel at home. Including myself. She counts herself among the legendary creatures. It would be easy to call that charming or empowering, but I think it’s something more than either of those.

It’s a delirious collapsing of the distance between maker and myth. She isn’t standing outside the universe she built, directing it from a safe distance… she’s inside it, one of its creatures, subject to the same ancient forces and folklore as Báthory and Dracula and the other Carpathian icons. There’s a kind of radical imaginative humility in that, or maybe the opposite of humility. She made the world, and then she walked into it, and became part of it.

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