A group of Russian women were once the hottest things at couture, embraced not just by fashion, but by the watching world. Where are they now?
Around this time just over a decade ago something happened in fashion that was as rare and unexpected as the sight of Kate Moss in a tutu.
The front row of the couture shows, that rarefied array that often seems preserved in amber, underwent something of a metamorphosis seemingly overnight. A group of young women materialized en masse, with a magnetic combination of beauty, charm, wealth and wardrobes that sent the watching fashion world into a frenzy. That they happened to emerge from Russia, once considered something of a fashion wasteland and then a flashy arriviste, made them irresistible.
“The Czarinas Are Back,” crowed a headline in The New York Times, not long after a Style.com story called them the new “Russian Federation.”
“They broke the stereotype of Russia,” said Robert Burke, the founder of a namesake luxury consultancy.
Also known as the Russian fashion mafia, the Russian fashion pack and the Russian fashion royals, they were a rotating group that included the designer Vika Gazinskaya as well as the model and charity founder Natalia Vodianova, but with a core composed of Miroslava Duma, a fashion editor and entrepreneur; Elena Perminova, a model with a Cinderella back story; and Ulyana Sergeenko, a designer.
All were connected by their offbeat personal taste, a tendency to change clothes multiple times a day and their photographer friendliness and wealth. And they were following in the footsteps of Dasha Zhukova, the society figure and art and magazine world entrepreneur.
Their profiles rose with the advent of street style and Instagram and the post-Glasnost emergence of Russia as a flourishing market. Later they built fiefs and brands of their own on the foundation of their early fashion fame. They were eye-catching bridges between Russia and the world.
As Karin Winroth, an associate professor of Business at Södertörn University in Sweden, wrote in the scholarly journal Baltic Worlds: “They were not only seen as role models and inspirational for fashion: They were also regarded as ambassadors of a new Russia. Their popularity put Russia on the map as a country offering fashionable inspiration.”
At least until this February, when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and those bridges began to look very shaky — along with the way fashion itself can be a shortcut to acceptance, reverberating beyond individuals to affect perception in the world at large.
Makeovers, after all, are not limited to people.
The Transitive Theory of Image Making
“People use fashion and taste to rehabilitate themselves or empower a larger project like a profession or country,” said Sophia Rosenfeld, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “Democracy and Truth: A Short History.” “To whitewash themselves or a national culture or a set of business practices.”
Think of it as the theory of the transitive properties of taste and connoisseurship — qualities that suggest shared value systems that transcend borders and connect world views — in practice.
