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Founder of the 'La Blouse Roumaine' community Andreea Tanasescu said on Monday in northwestern Oradea that Romania is the first European country that is being vetted and proposed as an international textile tourist destination by fashion lecturer and creator of the hauteculturefashion.com platform, Donna Bramhall.
"There are a lot of people all over the world who passionately work in textile design, in various techniques, dyeing, embroidery, weaving, a.s.o. In the digital age, this Arts @ Crafts movement has been revived all over the world, particularly thanks to the internet. In Romania there are hundreds of online sewing bees, traditional textiles are being recreated. Traditional textile tourism is mainly targeted at connoisseurs. Donna has identified this growing niche. It's not just her who promotes this type of tourism, there are many other initiatives, but she comes to countries where the textile tradition - although not necessarily about to become extinct - is endangered," Andreea Tanasescu told a press conference.
The event also saw the participation of Donna Bramhall (from the UK), founder of the Haute Culture Textile Tours travel company dedicated to traditional dress, textiles and sub-culture fashion trends, who is on a one-month trip through the country. On June 24 she arrived in Oradea, where the Day of the Romanian Blouse was marked by a press conference - the first in the seven years since the start of the project - and by an event devoted to the Romanian blouse in Beius, home to the 'binsenesc' traditional sheepskin waistcoat.
"The purpose of this first Romanian tour of the 'La Blouse Roumaine' community, together with Donna Bramhall, is to open Romania as an international cultural textile tourism destination. Donna has developed this wonderful project of promoting cultural identity through traditional textiles. Up until 2019 it has run only in Asia and South America, with tours in Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, Peru, she is now opening Guatemala, and Romania is the first European country to be prospected and, as such, proposed as an international textile tourism destination," said Andreea Tanasescu.
Asked why she has chosen Romania as a destination, Donna Bramhall mentioned in the first place the fantastic promotion made by the 'La Blouse Roumaine' community, and her fascination with the fact that Romania is among the few European countries promoted at such a level, which has thus led her to discover the extraordinary richness of Romanian traditional aesthetics and crafts.
Romania is being promoted as one of the most exciting tourist destinations in Europe, including on large platforms such as Lonely Planet or National Geographic. The first impression is that it is an absolutely special country from the perspective of art, design and crafts, Bramhall said.
On Monday, Andreea Tanasescu marked in Oradea and Beius the seventh anniversary of the Universal Day of the Romanian Blouse, a globally absolutely unique movement that brought together Romanians from over 150 locations from 50 countries.
