We have created a nostalgic collection — Reconstructed Memories. The new colours are familiar to everyone who lived in the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet countries — Cacao, Barbariska, Kissel, Halva, Baikal, Varenye, Powidl, and Bubblegum.

We asked Zidans co-founder and designer Lilia Kosyreva to tell us about the concept behind the new collection and why it turned out to be so nostalgic. You can already check out the first drop on the website.

Lilia speaking:
Do you know that feeling when you return to the city of your childhood? The bus arrives on schedule. The map still bears the same name. But the city you have come back to no longer exists. It survives only where memory has not yet agreed to let it go.

Almost everything has changed. The school seems smaller, the trees shorter. The houses have grown old. Or, perhaps even sadder, they have been renovated and lost their faces. The streets are lined with unfamiliar signs, accidental colours, and an unfamiliar rhythm. It feels as though the city has forgotten its own language. That is when you begin searching for it in old photographs, if any have survived. For those whose childhood unfolded in the final years of the Soviet Union, memory is rarely something that can simply be retrieved.

More often, it must be reconstructed from scents, voices, fleeting images, and fragments of moments.

Over time, other people's memories begin to find their way into your own. Photographs, paintings, books, films, theatre sets. Artists have a way of preserving what cannot be held in memory.

Gradually, the city of your childhood becomes a city of collective memory. Your own recollections merge with those of others until it becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins. What remains is a city that may never have existed quite as you now remember it, yet one that returns through life's happiest, most painful, and therefore most unforgettable moments. It is a world of reflections. A world of stories, cultural codes, traditions, and symbols, where memory quietly becomes fiction — and fiction, in turn, becomes a new kind of memory. This is the very material a ballet set designer works with. They do not recreate an era; they create its remembrance. They assemble the memories of other generations as they believe they are meant to be seen, building their own imaginary city from collective memory.

But perhaps we all do the same? Everything we see is filtered through the experience we carry within us. In a way, each of us becomes a set designer reconstructing the city of our childhood from memory and calling it our life.

View the full collection here. 

Photographer: Daria Djalelova
Model: Anfisa Oschepkova