Garabonc Anorak

As you approach this coat, the first thing you notice about it is its colour:  a wondrously deep, reddishly radiant, shiny, near-black blue.  To Hungarians, this distinctive hue is immediately recognisable as that of the master indigo dyer of 19th and 20th-century rural Hungary, whose resist-print wares were sold primarily at market.  Patterned to suit local tastes, indigo-printed fabrics were then used to make a variety of clothing items, whether for special occasions, ordinary days, or work.

As you step closer, however, you discover that the light anorak is not merely inspired by old-style garments – it is actually made from them.  Its sizeable front pocket and back are fashioned from the corners of a traditional green-patterned, post-mourning headscarf, while its sleeves preserve the pleated fabric of a disassembled woman’s skirt. 

The coat belongs to the REMADE collection of textile designer Dóra Zsigmond, whose clothing is represented in the museum’s Textiles and Clothing Collection by a set of pieces acquired in 2025.  With REMADE, Zsigmond has sought to utilise old garments and textiles in a way that preserves both their materials, and the techniques associated with their manufacture.  This coupling of extreme respect with a sense of playfulness has yielded, for example, a hooded waistcoat from a fringed woollen berliner scarf, a pair of shorts from a light, braid-trimmed, decoratively hemmed Kiskőrös skirt, and a black velvet coat lining from a crimson-patterned cotton-print kerchief.

Zsigmond’s design approach references peasant dress not through ornamentation, but by the incorporation of regional fabrics, rescuing older objects from destruction and giving them new life.  Consciously constructive, personal, and contemporary, her method is one that reflects on important issues of the 21^st century, like recycling, environmental awareness, and sustainability, urging responsible consumption in the face of the burgeoning wastes from ‘fast fashion’.  Beyond this, however, it also engages with historical questions:   What fate has typically awaited the textiles of generations past?  Once a pleated skirt has been meticulously stored in its traditional twisted coil; a printed headscarf tucked away in tissue paper; what then?  Where do the carefully kept garments go?  Not everything can find its way into a museum, heritage home, or private collection.  

Zsigmond’s response?  Reimagine them!  Grant them new life – in the form of a limited line of high-standard, creatively produced, contemporary apparel.  And on other side of the equation:  the need for conscious consumers with an interest in ethically made objects – people who can appreciate both this clothing, and the stories it has to tell – is a real and growing one.

As for the processes vested in our anorak:  cotton fabrics, resist-printing, and indigo dye were all key features of the emerging global textile industry of the early 19^th century.  In Hungary, indigo is often associated with national revolutionary Lajos Kossuth, who saw blue-printing as one potential pillar for Hungarian industrialisation.  In the case of Dóra Zsigmond’s coat, however, the upcycling of these materials in this particular way is an homage not only to the once-thriving indigo craft, but also to the generations of be-costumed peasant women whose crisply pleated skirts and green-patterned scarves it so aptly preserves.

text: Mónika Lackner

photos: Krisztina Sarnyai

Designed by:  ZSIGMOND – Dóra Zsigmond
REMADE collection, 2025

NM 2026.40.3