Uniqlo has teamed up with the Berlin-based Ukrainian Cultural Community to create a joint collection. It includes basic T-shirts, longsleeves and shopper bags featuring drawings by four Ukrainian artists currently living in Berlin: Zina Isupova, Viki Berg, Ptashka Somari and Anastasiia Pasichnyk
The joint collection is part of the Uniqlo project called UTme. It allows customers to choose their own design: they can customize a T-shirt, longsleeve or shopper bag with prints directly in the store, as well as add text, images or stickers to it.
You can buy custom T-shirts featuring prints by Ukrainian artists in the Uniqlo flagship store in Berlin located at Tauentzienstraße 7b/c.
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At the same time, the German office announced that it had made a charitable donation of 5,000 EUR to support the Ukrainian Cultural Community.
About the artists and their works
Zina Isupova is a Kyiv-based artist who has lived in Berlin since 2022. She specializes in creating colorful paper collages, «capturing simple, everyday objects reduced to their bare minimum».
«Some objects catch my attention because they seem incredibly simple. I isolate them from their environment and put them on paper. This is how portraits of these objects are formed, highlighting their hidden beauty. I show their simplicity while revealing their complexity», Zina says.
Viki Berg is an artist from Kharkiv who now lives and works in Berlin. She creates tufted carpets to «combine reality with the cultural history of her country».
«For me, tufting is a way of redefining my identity by using the ancient technique of weaving, as my female ancestors have done for centuries, but in new, modern forms».
Ptashka Somari is a street artist who moved from Ukraine to Berlin in 2022. She creates drawings on walls, frescoes and canvases based on post-graffiti and retrofuturism. Her works feature fictional characters created by the artist.
For the Uniqlo collaboration, Ptashka Somari chose a drawing from the Berlin murals she had previously created. One is on the wall of the RAW space in the Friedrichshain district, a second one is on the wall of the Hotel Berlin in the Tiergarten district, another graffiti is painted on the former Teufelsberg spy station, and the last one is located in an apartment complex in the Reinickendorf district.
Anastasiia Pasichnyk is an artist and founder of the Ukrainian Cultural Community. The project supports Ukrainian artists in Berlin who were forced to move because of russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. The team looks for housing and studios and organizes cultural projects, exhibitions, concerts and lectures to «promote multicultural cooperation».
Anastasiia created two new prints for a collaboration with UTme.
After the start of russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Uniqlo temporarily suspended operations at its stores in russia. According to Forbes, until March 2022 Uniqlo brand had 50 stores in russia, at the end of January 2023 their number was reduced to 27 — all of them were closed.
At the end of 2022 Uniqlo suffered more than 140 million dollars in losses on the russian market.
In the spring of 2023, the brand decided to close all chain stores in russia.
