Bulgarian costume

Bulgarian folk costume in Bulgaria is the garments that were worn in Bulgarian villages until the beginning of the 20^th century. These garments were hand made in the villages using materials that were produced locally. The basic structure of the clothing worn by men and women for workdays and holidays remained the same for many hundreds of years, until urban influenced fashion and factory produced clothes became available. The garments that can be seen in ethnographic museums today date from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century which is the period when the most elaborate costumes were made. The costumes on display are often those worn for weddings, which had the most layers, and were worn with heavy metal jewellery. After women were married, and later were widowed the number of garments worn was reduced, with those being worn have little or no decoration. By the 1930s the strict adherence to the use of indictors of age in the structure of the garment worn died out.

Bulgarian folk costumes consist of pants, shirts, and vests for men, and dresses and aprons for women. The aprons, dresses, and shirts are usually embroidered in regional colors and folk motifs. Red features heavily in Bulgarian folk dress, but black, green, and white are also a part of traditional clothing from Bulgaria's various regions.

Bulgaria men's costumes and women's costumes can be classified into several categories, although there were not strict boundaries to the occurrence of each costume type, and the styles of costume worn in each region changed over time due to fashion influences and population movements. After Bulgaria was liberated from the Ottomans in 1878, many migrants from the Stara Planina mountains moved down to the Danube plains and took over farms abandoned by the Turks. This resulted in the double apron and belodrešnik (white men’s) costume being displaced from the foothills of the Stara Planina and parts of north east Bulgaria. In other cases the two costume types were worn side by side by women with the warmer tunic style costumes being worn in winter. Along the Thracian Plain and in the Rhodopes the single apron costume was worn for work in the fields in summer alongside saya and soukman costumes It was also usual in the past for a bride to be taken to her husband's village when they got married taking with her her dowry of which her folk costume formed part. Later her costume was passed on as a gift to her daughter, who again might move to a different village when she got married.