ABODI Transylvania’s Living Mythology

In Transylvania, legends have never quite stayed in the past. They linger in the forests, in the stone of old fortresses, in the stories told to children at dusk. With The Chronicles, its newest collection, ABODI Transylvania does not preserve these tales so much as wake them.
The fashion house has always drawn exclusively from Transylvanian heritage, and here it leans into the region’s harder edges: the toughness, raw energy and quiet mysticism of Eastern Europe and the Balkans. The results are less garments than wearable statues, pieces that feel as at home on a plinth as on a body.

At the heart of the collection stands Elisabeth Báthory. History has not been kind to the countess; for centuries she has been remembered as a witch, a monster, a warning. ABODI Transylvania offers another reading. Here she is a woman feared for refusing to obey, and her story becomes a lens on something older and more stubborn: the pressure on women to remain young, beautiful and under control.

The collection is made slowly, and much of it by hand. There are hand-painted pieces and a sculptural patchwork coat built in three dimensions from antique hemp, once hand-woven by Transylvanian peasants. There are antique laces laid over cotton, and garments sewn alongside local seamstresses. Paintings and illustrations move freely between roles, becoming prints, surfaces and structures in turn.
The images, by long-time collaborator Szilveszter Makó, carry the same weight. Through them, Ursula Wangander shifts from one dark archetype to the next: Báthory, Dracula, the elusive water vila, the Cat Mermaid, a procession of ghosts. Suspended between past and present, each figure holds vulnerability and dominance at once.

The collection also revisits the brand’s most recognizable object. The Vampire Castle headpiece travelled far beyond Transylvania, and was followed by a bag and its miniature twin. Now comes a rotating, wearable castle sculpture, conjured from a half-faded childhood memory of a dark fortress. It meets somewhere between gothic nostalgia and brutalist mid-century form.
For Creative Director Dora Abodi, the boundaries between disciplines were never firm. Alongside the clothing, the house makes ceramic masks and sculptures, among them ceramic vampire hands and a Dracula mask, with fashion, ceramics, painting and sculpture treated as equals.