The painter Henri Matisse and the designer Yves Saint-Laurent both took inspiration from it. The British singer Adele wore it for a Vogue fashion shoot. Louis Vuitton used it for one of the company’s seasonal “By the Pool” collections of luxury products.
More recently, the Romanian blouse — an embroidered top traditionally worn by villagers, particularly women — has acquired a new set of devotees: nationalist politicians in Romania besotted with folk couture as a badge of devotion to the nation and its traditions.
Diana Sosoaca, a far-right firebrand, has made the blouse — known in Romanian as “ie,” pronounced “ee-yeh” — a central part of her political brand. She rarely appears in public dressed in anything else. George Simion, a nationalist candidate who lost a presidential election on Sunday, is also a fan, as are many of his supporters.
Calin Georgescu, an ultranationalist who won the first round of a subsequently canceled presidential vote last year, centered his campaign on TikTok videos that featured him dressed in the blouse riding a white horse, among other activities.
For liberals this has become a big turnoff.
Alina Dumitriu, the head of a group in Bucharest, the Romanian capital, that helps people living with H.I.V., said she used to like wearing the blouse but dropped it from her wardrobe because “it has been hijacked by extremists and turned into an ideological weapon.”
“It was part of our tradition and was for everyone” she said, “But they turned it into a nationalist symbol of exclusion — for pure and moral people.”
Romania’s nationalists often accuse liberals of selling out traditional morals and bowing to the European Union, of which the country has been a member since 2007. But their efforts to appeal to tradition failed to win the presidency for Mr. Simion, who lost decisively to Nicusor Dan, the centrist mayor of Bucharest.
While some progressives have ditched the blouse, many others who dislike its recent association with the far right think that a boycott would let politicians grab for themselves an important part of Romania’s common culture.
“My grandmother and great-grandmother were sewing and wearing ‘ie’ long before the far right took it,” said Daniel Stanciu, who runs a small business with his wife that, working with older seamstresses in the countryside, makes and sells embroidered blouses.
“People assume I’m with Simion because of what I sell,” Mr. Stanciu said as he tended his stall in the National Village Museum in Bucharest, an open-air display showcasing Romanian peasant life.
He said that he had recently received a phone call from a woman who was interested in placing an order and who congratulated him for standing “on the good side” with “patriots.” She decided not to buy, he recalled, after he made clear that he was not a supporter of Mr. Simion.
The blouse, he said, “belongs to all of us, not just them.”
Raluca Mihailescu, 23, a psychology student who, dressed in goth-style clothes, recently took part in a pre-election rally in support of Mr. Simion’s rival, Mr. Dan, said that traditional tops embroidered with bright flowers were “not really my style.” But, she added, she has occasionally worn one and resented nationalists “taking something that is part of all Romanians’ culture.”
Apolitical fans of the blouse are less bothered by political appropriation than what they see as cultural appropriation by powerful foreign fashion houses.
Andreea Diana Tanasescu, who manages a Facebook page celebrating “la blouse roumaine,” said she had no problem with Yves Saint-Laurent drawing inspiration from Romanian blouses because “he was an artist,” credited Romania and turned its village dress into “haute couture.”
But she was upset with Louis Vuitton and with the Chinese fast-fashion brand Shein for copying Romanian patterns and cuts without giving credit. Last year, she started an online campaign demanding that foreign companies obtain permission from Romania to copy its blouse designs.
The blouse, Ms. Tanasescu said, “is like a birth certificate,” each one identifying the wearer as not only a Romanian but, depending on the colors and patterns of the embroidery, as belonging to a specific village or region.
“We have been through decades of communism and many other troubles, but the Romanian blouse has always stayed the same and is part of us all,” she said.
Asserting exclusive ownership of the blouse by Romania risks irking Bulgarians, Ukrainians and others in Eastern Europe who also wear embroidered tops that, at least to the nonexpert eye, look very similar.
Experts insist they are very different. Doina Isfanoni, an ethnologist at Romania’s village museum, has spent decades traveling the country to catalog what she said are uniquely Romanian blouses.
In 2022, UNESCO declared the blouse part of the “cultural identity” of Romania and its neighbor Moldova, formerly part of Romania.
Dr. Isfanoni scoffed at what she saw as efforts by politicians to exploit the blouse for electoral purposes, noting that they often wore cheap, machine-made knockoffs rather than genuine articles embroidered by hand.
Nationalists like Mr. Simion and Ms. Sosoaca, she said, “want to show that they represent true Romania and its traditions” but “this is just a parody of tradition” aimed at “fooling people.”
In Romania, where a wealthy elite living in cities like Bucharest has long been disconnected from the majority of the population in the countryside, embracing the traditional blouse has provided an easy way to display a connection with the masses.
Dr. Isfanoni said that Romania’s last queen, Marie, who was born and raised mostly in Britain before being married off to the Romanian crown prince in 1892, and other foreign members of the royal family often wore traditional blouses “to show that they were real Romanians.”
One leader who shunned the embroidered blouse was Nicolae Ceausescu, Romania’s communist dictator from 1965 until 1989. Born into a poor village family, he had no need to establish his credentials as a son of the soil.
Though embraced by politicians as a marker of authenticity and of a connection to common folk, the blouse is in many ways highly elitist because of its price tag. A genuine, hand-embroidered example can cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on the fabric and the intricacy of the embroidery.
The high price of blouses embroidered by hand has opened the way for a flood of machine-made articles from China and elsewhere, making it difficult for traditional artisans to compete. Many of these are older women in the countryside who can spend months making a single top.
Nicoleta Uta, an ambulance nurse in Domnesti, a village northeast of Bucharest, is a devotee of the Romanian blouse. She said she realized that the craft risked dying out when the only person left in her village who knew how to make a blouse was an 87-year-old woman.
She asked the woman to help teach local youngsters embroidery and started a class at her home. On a recent afternoon, 16 girls sat in rapt attention as they stitched away for hours. Her best embroidery pupil, she said, was a teenage boy, but his family moved away.
Teaching teenagers to stitch, Ms. Uta said, not only keeps traditional handicrafts alive, but also helps wean young people off their cellphones, at least for a few hours.
“They learn how to concentrate and feel joy and fulfillment when they see what they have created,” she said.
Politicians “are all wearing fake blouses and setting a bad example for everyone,” she added. “We need to go back to traditions but real ones, not traditions deformed by politics.”
Andrada Lautaru contributed reporting.
Andrew Higgins is the East and Central Europe bureau chief for The Times based in Warsaw. He covers a region that stretches from the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to Kosovo, Serbia and other parts of former Yugoslavia.
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