Finally, some proper (Ethel) Voynich fashion…

The normal scenario for Voynich fashion is for some short-run digital-print textile house (whether making T-shirts, hoodies or whatever) to put some nice evocative Voynich image on the stuff they sell. You know, on sites such as RedBubble and the like.

Teito T-shirts

And this is basically the deal with classy Japanese T-shirt company Teito T-shirts, which I saw a few days ago. They sell one T-shirt with a nice balneo picture, one with a nice astro picture, and one with a nice Herbal B image (in fact, the concealed ‘car’ page I proposed back in 2006, Curse fans).

Siddhartha Tytler

If you want some Indian designer Voynich gear, controversial creator Siddhartha Tytler (son of Jagdish Tytler) has some rather livelier print-on-demand designs for your delectation and delight. For children, he offers a Voynich printed skirt with choli/shirt kurta (though the design isn’t that Voynichy to my eyes, I have to say):

Tytler also has a multicolour Voynich kurta with patiala pants combo, which is a bit more in the right kind of direction, I think:

Ajour Lingerie

So far so (reasonably) predictable. But… then I stumbled upon a Voynich range of lingerie, courtesy of Anna-Bella Lingerie of Alpharetta, GA. From there, Pam McKinzie kindly redirected me to Tetyana Kravchuk of Ajour Lingerie in Ukraine, the company who designed and made the range, some of which is below:

Now: having looked very closely (in the name of primary evidence, of course, why else would anyone do such a thing?) at these, I honestly couldn’t see any design elements linking these with the Voynich Manuscript at all. And so I asked Tetyana Kravchuk why they chose the name. She replied:

“The line name [is] Voynich because the general theme of the collection was names of the writers and novelists. Especially this line named Voynich, because it’s so much different from others. Seductive and modest, revolutiona[ry] & calm.“

So there you have it. It’s actually Ethel Voynich lingerie.

And now you know.