Traditional costumes
The Lithuanian national costume was started to be created at the end of the 19th - the beginning of the national liberation movement and upon the formation of the national self-consciousness. Peasants' holiday traditional garments served as the background for the creation of the national costume. The above holiday traditional garments had formed in feudal Lithuania until the middle of the 19th century under the effect of histirical, economical and climatic conditions, the character of economic activity, confession, custums and traditions of the nation. The garments of peasantry unlike the individual fashionable clothes of the urbanites and the nobles that where of common European caracter distinguished themselves in each ethnographic region of Lithuania by their special features, forming complexes of traditional garments of the Aukštaičiai, Žemaičiai, Dzūkai, Suvalkiečiai and Lithuania Minor etnographic regions. The common features of parishes, villages or even neighbours became prominent in the etnographic regions, but the wearers of traditional garments strove for the individuality of clothes with all their efforts.
The period of the creation of the Lithuanian national costume was extensive covering the whole century. It contains a great deal of phantasy and free interpretation of the creators of the national costume. Some variants of the national costumes, especially those created outside Lithuania, shunned from the samples of the traditional clothes the Lithuanian peasants used to wear and became similar to the garments worn by the people of other nationalities in the neighbouring republics.
Lithuanian ethnographic literature contains quite a number of publications on clothes, but this publication is of quite diffrent character. It is aimed at acquainting the public with a scientific background (basing on the historical-archival, iconographic, museum sources and the authors' material collected during the etnographic expeditions), the reconstructions of national costumes performed, which would be of assistance for futher creation of the national costume.