Concerts Opera Dance Theater Gigs Exhibits

	RFW Darya Razumikhina's designs draw on folk art.

Slavic Style

Russian fashion searches for its soul.

By Joyce Man
Published: April 15, 2005

Paris has its couture, Milan its consumption-driven clothing market and New York its signature urban chic. Russian fashion, however, is still searching for its identity. As home-grown talents and designers from around the CIS showed off their latest collections at Russian Fashion Week, a biannual event that wrapped up Thursday, experts were divided about the question of whether the local clothing industry has a specific style of its own.

Anna Lebsak-Kleimans, general director and head of research at Fashion Consulting Group, believes that there is no single, monolithic concept that underpins Russian fashion. "There are several themes that are perceived as authentic," she said during an interview in late March. "You have the red collar and Soviet imagery, and there is an element of Byzantine glamour with the rich, colorful palette of Russian dress, the romantic themes of Art Deco and conceptual Constructivism. It is almost impossible to squeeze it into one simple statement."

Alexander Shumsky, general producer of RFW, flatly denied that a specific local style exists. "There may be a Slavic aesthetic in some designers' work, and a distinguishable Ukrainian look in others, but there is no such thing as a 'Russian style.' Our designers are all different," he said during an interview in late March at the offices of the Artefact public relations agency.

Although the clothing on display at RFW reflected a melange of tastes and numerous sources of inspiration -- including Olga Komissarova's slacks and sweaters, which took their look straight from the ski slopes, and Karina Kazaryan's chessboard-themed black and white basics -- several designers put a distinctly Russian face on their creations.

Marina Shulyateva harked back to Russia's pre-revolutionary past in an April 4 runway show for her ITS clothing label, showcasing T-shirts emblazoned with pictures of Ivan the Terrible and attempting to revive peasant shirts with pleated front panels. In a backstage interview after the show, the designer said that the identity of Russian fashion is embedded in the traditions of the Russian people.

"There is a feeling to our fashion, and it comes from our history. If we do not have a past, we cannot have a future," Shulyateva said. "We can use clothes to explain the Russian soul."

RFW also featured the designs of Darya Razumikhina, who calls her signature style a "sophisticated exotic post-folk look" on the web site of her Razu Mikhina clothing line. Her April 2 show featured dresses and skirt patterns inspired by the abstract color paintings of Vasily Kandinsky.

But one of the best-known Russian designers who draws on national themes did not participate in RFW. Denis Simachyov has found international success with his loud, flowery T-shirts featuring hammer-and-sickle logos and images of President Vladimir Putin, as well as fantastical snegurochka dresses inspired by Russian folk traditions. His show at Milan Fashion Week in January marked the first time that a Russian designer had participated in the venerable event, and his clothing now sells in boutiques from New York to Tokyo to Madrid.

For designers like Simachyov, Russia's rich history is likely to keep providing fodder for fashion ideas. Just as the Mao Zedong jacket collar remains the staple of China's present-day revolutionary chic at the high-end stores of the Shanghai Tang brand and the flamenco dress reappears on Madrid's runways time and time again, it appears that imagery from the past may well become a recurring theme in Russian fashion.

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