The Two Soviet Moments

Russian fashion has had two distinct productive periods, separated by fifty-six years of state-controlled drabness. The first was the Russian avant-garde of 1917–1935, when constructivist artists — Varvara Stepanova, Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko, El Lissitzky — produced what was, in the 1920s, the most radical textile and clothing design in Europe. Stepanova and Popova's 1923 prozodezhda ("production clothing") designs argued that Soviet dress should be functional, mass-produced, geometrically legible, and industrially coloured. The textile designs they produced for the Moscow First Cotton Printing Factory in 1924 — bold red-and-black geometric prints, circular and grid patterns — remain, a century later, some of the most-referenced Russian design objects.

The avant-garde ended in 1935 with the Stalinist cultural retrenchment. For the next fifty-six years, Soviet fashion was a state-managed, design-institute product — the Dom Modelei (House of Models) in Moscow, staffed by salaried designers, producing a small number of approved patterns each year for the state-owned clothing factories. There was no Soviet Yves Saint Laurent, no Soviet Armani. Soviet dress was, by design, utilitarian and undistinguished.

The 1991 Collapse and the Reopening

The Soviet collapse on 26 December 1991 opened the Russian market to international fashion for the first time in seven decades. Western luxury houses — Chanel, Dior, Hermès, Gucci — moved into Moscow aggressively through the 1990s, and the country developed, in the oil-wealth-driven 2000s, one of the most important new luxury consumer bases in Europe. Russian private fashion design, however, remained weak. Russian Fashion Week, launched in Moscow in 1994, struggled to produce designers of international recognition throughout its first two decades.

The figures who began to shift this trajectory were photographers and stylists working in the post-Soviet urban landscape. Gosha Rubchinskiy, a Moscow-born photographer and skateboarder, launched his eponymous label in 2008 with a collection that directly photographed, and then clothed, the contemporary Russian working-class adolescent — tracksuits, oversized t-shirts, Cyrillic graphics, bootleg sportswear branding. The 2014 Paris Fashion Week debut of Rubchinskiy's brand was the moment international fashion formally acknowledged the post-Soviet aesthetic as a category.

Demna and the Balenciaga Moment

The Georgian-Russian designer Demna Gvasalia (born 1981, Sukhumi) converted the post-Soviet vocabulary into full European luxury. Demna had trained at the Antwerp Royal Academy of Fine Arts, worked under Martin Margiela at Maison Margiela, and under Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton. In 2014 he founded Vetements in Paris with his brother Guram. Vetements' oversized silhouettes, ironic high-low mixtures (DHL courier t-shirts as runway pieces, knockoff-Metallica sweatshirts), and deliberately semi-derelict post-Soviet referencing became, in 2014–16, the dominant new voice in European fashion.

In October 2015 Demna was appointed creative director of Balenciaga (Kering group). The Balenciaga he has produced since — platform Crocs, trash-bag clutches, destroyed Paris-show scenography, direct quotations from Soviet-era state aesthetic — has converted the 1937 Cristóbal Balenciaga couture house into the most commercially successful French luxury brand of the late 2010s and early 2020s. In 2021 he also briefly reopened Balenciaga's haute couture calendar presence. He remains, for the moment, the single Russian-Caucasian designer with a major French heritage house.

The Moscow Scene

The contemporary Moscow fashion scene — Walk of Shame (Andrey Artyomov), Ria Keburia (Georgian-Russian, Moscow-based), Yana Besfamilnaya, ZDDZ, Alexander Terekhov — operates in the same post-Soviet vocabulary as Rubchinskiy and Demna but at a smaller commercial scale. The club-culture export has been significant: Moscow's electronic music scene of the 2010s (the Gazgolder club, the Mutabor complex) produced a styling vocabulary that reached Berlin, London, and New York through Instagram and through the touring DJ economy. Russian models and stylists have been disproportionately visible on the European fashion-industry landscape since approximately 2015.

The 2022 Rupture

The February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine changed the international situation of Russian fashion drastically. Most major Western houses suspended operations in Russia; Russian designers' access to Paris and Milan show calendars was largely curtailed; Demna — despite his Georgian nationality and his public statements against the war — has been operating under sustained international pressure. At the time of writing, the future of Russian fashion's international presence is genuinely uncertain for the first time since 1991.

What is beyond dispute is that Russian designers — Rubchinskiy, Demna, and the Moscow scene — produced the single most internationally influential new fashion aesthetic of the 2010s. Post-Soviet as a descriptor is now part of the global fashion vocabulary. Whether Russian fashion continues to produce work at this level through the 2020s depends, substantially, on the geopolitical resolution of the next decade.