A/W 2021 Collection – Stories from Slavic Mythology

Stories from Slavic Mythology

For the A/W 2021 collection I returned to stories I knew from growing up in Poland — tales of forests, strange creatures, guardians, warnings and magic that had stayed somewhere in my imagination for years.

Slavic mythology has always fascinated me because it is not a perfect fairy-tale world. It can be beautiful and mysterious, but also dark, humorous and sometimes quite frightening.

I wanted to bring some of that atmosphere into the collection, not by illustrating the old stories literally, but by creating my own characters and worlds around them.

Stories I Grew Up With

The stories I remember were often connected with nature. Forests had their guardians, strange creatures lived close to people, and the natural world was never simply a background.

There was always the feeling that something else might be there — hidden behind the trees or living just beyond what we could see.

That mixture is what I wanted to keep. I was less interested in recreating mythology exactly as it had been told and more interested in the feeling those stories left behind.

Leshy – Guardian of the Forest

One of the characters that found its way into the collection was Leshy, the mysterious guardian of the forest.

In Slavic stories, the forest was a place with its own rules and its own spirit. Leshy belonged to that world — unpredictable, connected to animals and trees, and never completely understandable to people who entered his territory.

I loved that idea of the forest having a personality of its own.

In my illustration, Leshy became part creature and part landscape, surrounded by the natural forms and darker colours that shaped the atmosphere of the A/W collection.

The Griffin and the Basilisk

The Griffin and Basilisk brought another kind of story into the collection.

Both creatures appear in legends and mythology in different forms, and I liked the idea of placing them together inside one imagined world.

They gave me the freedom to draw something dramatic and slightly strange — feathers, scales, claws, wings and decorative details all meeting within the same composition.

As with many of my illustrations, the story is deliberately left open. I want the person looking at the scarf to decide what is happening between the characters.

Drawing Mythology in My Own Way

Mythology gives an illustrator wonderful material because the stories already have a history, but they also leave so much room for imagination.

I did not want these scarves to look like illustrations from an old book. I wanted the characters to belong to the Ilona Tambor world.

Every character began with drawing by hand. I then developed the separate elements digitally, working with scale, repetition and colour until they became complete scarf compositions.

The darker palette of the collection suited these stories particularly well. There are still strong colours and intricate details, but they sit within a more mysterious atmosphere than many of my earlier designs.

Stories Made to Be Worn

I have always liked the idea of taking something traditionally found in books, paintings or folklore and allowing it to become part of something worn.

When a scarf is completely open, you can follow much more of the story. Once it is folded, only fragments remain — perhaps the eye of a creature, a wing, a flower or part of the border.

The illustration changes every time the scarf is tied, and I think that suits mythology perfectly. These stories have always changed slightly as they passed from one person to another.

Looking Back at A/W 2021

This collection remains very personal to me because its inspiration reaches back much further than the season in which it was created.

The stories came from my Polish roots and from things I heard long before I thought about designing scarves.

Bringing Leshy, the Griffin and Basilisk into my own illustrated world was a way of returning to those memories while creating something completely new from them.

You can read more about these characters and other original illustrations in the Ilona Tambor design archive .

Old stories, remembered differently and drawn again.

Each piece begins with a line.