The Romanian blouse

What the ie is

The ie is the white shirt of Romanian folk dress. In everyday Romanian the word ie is used for the women's shirt. Locally it is also called cămeșe, spăcel or ciupag. It is sewn from white linen, hemp or cotton cloth, sometimes from borangic, a natural silk. The embroidery sits mainly on the sleeves, the chest and the neck.

Each part has a name. The altiță is the wide, richly stitched band on the shoulder, found nowhere else on the shirt. Below it comes the încreț, a narrow strip that once gathered the cloth and later became purely decorative. The râuri are the rows of motifs that run down the sleeve to the cuff and, in many areas, down the chest. The umăr is the seam that joins the sleeve to the front and back.

The cut is simple, made of straight pieces of cloth. The beauty comes from the stitching. A single women's blouse can carry eight to ten different kinds of hand embroidery stitches.

How it changed

At first the threads were made at home, from wool, hemp, linen or silk. Factory threads came into use from the late nineteenth century and widened the range of colours. The old motifs were geometric. Flowers came later.

Also from the late nineteenth century, the sleeve was often cut from a single piece. The altiță, once a separate piece, stayed on as a decorative band stitched onto the sleeve. Richer blouses were given gold or silver metal thread, spangles and beads. In Bucovina, beads appeared mostly on the încreț.

Each area had its own way of laying out the râuri. In Moldavia they run at an angle, in the south they form vertical rows, and in Oltenia they fork. Colours depend on place and on age too, so an old ie tells you where it comes from and who wore it.

The ciupag and the areas around Cluj

In northern Transylvania, the mark of the women's shirt is the ciupag. It is a large trapezoid panel, made by embroidering geometric motifs over gathered pleats, that covers the upper chest below the collar. In the Apuseni Mountains and central Transylvania it spread across much of the shirt front. It was stitched in a single colour: red for young women, black for older ones.

In the nineteenth century the ciupag shirt was worn across a wide area: Năsăud, Lăpuș, the Reghin area, the Transylvanian Plain, Mocănimea Arieșului, Țara Moților and southern Sălaj. In the Călățele Depression it lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. It often went together with the zadia vânătă, the blue apron worn from the Arieș valley to the Gurghiu valley.

West of Cluj lies Țara Călatei, known in Hungarian as Kalotaszeg, with its historic centre at Huedin, an area where Romanians and Hungarians live side by side. Women's dress here is very colourful and richly ornamented, and locals still wear it on special occasions. Țara Oașului, further north, has shirts with the decoration grouped on the shoulder edge and the seams marked with white lace joins called cheițe.

Where to see real ones in Cluj

The Ethnographic Museum of Transylvania, founded in 1922, is the first ethnographic museum in Romania. Since 1957 it has been housed in the Reduta Palace at 21 Memorandumului Street. Its collections hold 41,542 artefacts, more than 10,000 of them traditional textiles, and clothing has a section of its own, arranged by type.

The permanent exhibition, "Folk Culture in Transylvania, 18th to 20th Centuries", opened in 2006, shows late nineteenth century peasant costumes from Țara Făgărașului, Mărginimea Sibiului, the Székely Land, Oaș, Maramureș, Năsăud, the Bistrița Saxon area, Mocănimea Arieșului, Călata, the Beiuș and Ineu areas, Cărbunari and Pădureni. The museum is open Wednesday to Sunday, 10:00 to 18:00, last entry at 17:00. Around 24 June the museum has held shirt exhibitions over the years: the ciupag in 2018, "The Shirt with Altiță from Transylvania" in 2023, folk costumes from the Cluj area in 2025.

The Romulus Vuia National Ethnographic Park, in Hoia forest, is the first open-air museum in Romania, founded on 1 June 1929. Its 16 hectares hold peasant households from distinct parts of Transylvania, fully furnished, and a sector of workshops that includes installations for finishing woollen cloth. Here you see the house and tools around the shirt, not a costume display.

UNESCO and 24 June

In 2022, "The art of the traditional blouse with embroidery on the shoulder (altiță), an element of cultural identity in Romania and the Republic of Moldova" was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, at the seventeenth session of the UNESCO committee. The two countries filed the nomination together. The inscription came on 1 December 2022, Romania's National Day.

UNESCO describes the craft as work done entirely by hand, usually passed down by women within the family. Styles and motifs vary with the region, the wearer's age and the maker's skill. Today some museums, schools and associations run courses.

The Universal Day of the Romanian Blouse falls on 24 June, the feast of Sânziene, also called Drăgaica. The day was proposed in 2012 by the online community La Blouse Roumaine, and the first edition took place in June 2013, under the theme "Fairies dress the Planet in IE". In Cluj, in 2023, the museum marked it with a traditional sewing gathering and stitching demonstrations.

Matisse and La Blouse roumaine

Henri Matisse painted La Blouse roumaine in Nice, at the Hôtel Régina, between December 1939 and April 1940. The oil on canvas measures 92 by 73 centimetres. The artist gave it to the French state, and today it belongs to the Centre Pompidou collection.

The museum's catalogue entry says the real subject of the painting is the embroidered blouse. Matisse photographed the stages of the work, and in the photographs the model gradually fades in favour of the blouse. The final version keeps a flat red background, wide white sleeves and a blue skirt. The blouse appears in his drawings from at least 1936.

The painting rarely travels. According to the Centre Pompidou, it is on show until 14 February 2027 at the H'ART Museum in Amsterdam, in the exhibition Chez Matisse.

Handmade or copy

After the UNESCO listing, makers asked for protection against cheap copies. A report published after the listing found blouses made in India and China selling in Bucharest for about 100 lei, while a good handmade ie sold for around 500 lei. Some copies carried labels presenting them as unique handcrafted work.

There is no official label yet that certifies an authentic ie. What you can do is compare: in the Cluj museum you can see what an old hand-sewn shirt looks like, with several kinds of stitches on the same piece, and you can ask a seller who sewed the blouse and on what cloth. A very low price is worth one more question.