Material Culture Archive: exploring the connections between clothing, memory, and history.
source · interpretation · product
TARIH
The history of Kazakhstan through clothing: from the nomadic era to independence.
ORDA
The drop’s logical starting point: the nomadic era. “Orda” is the ruler’s seat, the steppe’s mobile capital, where Kazakh statehood was born in the very logic of movement.
ALASH
A generation of the Kazakh intelligentsia at the meeting point of imperial Russia and the receding steppe. Journalism was the era’s infrastructure of self-knowledge; the newspaper “Qazaq” is its principal archival marker.
-
[REDACTED]
KazSSR
A contested yet inseparable part of Kazakhstan’s history. Within it we turn to what our forebears actually lived: to sport, and to the cosmos of Baikonur.
-
[REDACTED] -
[REDACTED] -
[REDACTED]
TAÑGY TAÑ
The dawn of the independent republic and the wild capitalism of the ’90s: bazaars, shuttle traders, the first tenge. KRI archives the era through the objects of everyday commerce.
-
[REDACTED] -
[REDACTED] -
[REDACTED]
KÜNAI Research Institute
Künai Research Institute is a Kazakhstan-based clothing brand built around a research-driven approach to design. Each garment emerges from a specific idea, context, and historical material, becoming a form through which the research continues to evolve.
The brand works with different layers of Kazakhstan’s history, from nomadic routes to the Soviet period and the years of independence. Each subject is approached as a field of study, explored through imagery, form, detail, and visual language. Clothing becomes a way of reflecting on and transmitting cultural experience. Behind every garment stands an idea; behind every visual decision stands a foundation.
The visual identity is rooted in steppe culture and Kazakh cosmology, in which the human being exists in constant relation to the sky, light, and natural cycles. The icon begins with the Aymüyiz ornament, reconstructed into a closed circular form: the image of the full moon, Tolğan Ay, read both as a source of orientation in darkness and as the silhouette placed over the eyes of hunting eagles to hold them calm and directed.
Material Culture Archive: exploring the connections between clothing, memory, and history.
