Recently, statements have appeared in the public discourse that cast doubt on the existence of embroidery on the clothes of Ukrainians in the late medieval and early modern periods, the reason for which is lack of material artifacts. After the Mongol conquest, Ukraine was not studied by archaeologists in Soviet times for political and ideological reasons, and written sources are extremely limited. However, we managed to find many indications in written sources and contemporary icons confirming the existence of embroidery on clothes. The methodological basis is the development of American culturalists regarding the “social life of things” (Franz Boas, Alfred Kroeber); the position of neo-evolutionists regarding the adaptive significance of cultural diversity and the action of the mechanism of cultural borrowings (Marshall Sahlins, Serhiy Arutyunov); and of Ukrainian scientists – Kateryna Hrushevska, who combined the principles of inclusion of objects of material culture in social life with valuable achievements of the evolutionary method; modern achievements of researchers of everyday culture, including techniques for identifying embroidery on the icons of the 15th–16th centuries (Olexander Tyshchenko). Among the written sources of the specified period, we can mention the testimony of the Frenchman Guillebert de Lannoy (who visited Ukraine in 1421) about the embroidered hats, mittens, and bags of Ukrainians in the 16th–17th centuries. Court documents and the Lithuanian Metrica (records of the Grand Duke’s Chancellery) report on silk and gold embroidered shirts, belts, handkerchiefs, women’s headdresses, towels; Guillaume Beauplan (1630–1648) writes about “handkerchiefs” and “handicrafts”; Ulrich von Werdum, who visited Galicia and Podillia in 1670–1672, mentions women’s shirts “embroidered with colored cotton”. Property registers of the Cossack elders of the 17th century contain a list of embroidered clothes. Also, icons of the 15th–16th centuries have images that most likely show embroidery on clothing.