Fashion Blogs

A group of whey-faced teenage models are assembled at the Regional Centre of Youth Culture in Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian territory on the Baltic Sea. They are there for a fashion show, as are around 150 editors and buyers — most standing, some sitting in the 40 beaten-up velvet-upholstered chairs provided — who have traveled from around the world to see the fall 2017 collection by 32-year-old men’s wear designer Gosha Rubchinskiy. The boys walk through a simple white curtain, sneakers squeaking, down a long stretch of parquet wooden floor flanked by a row of faded mirrors. The clothes are as humble as the surroundings: military-influenced shirts with epaulets, naval peacoats, boxy shirts with clipped ties and lots of sportswear pieces emblazoned with Cyrillic characters. Many in the audience had made the nine-hour flight from London, where the January 2017 men’s wear shows had kicked off earlier in the week. The next day, most left to catch Ermenegildo Zegna, the first show of the Milan men’s wear calendar, dragging through a connection in Moscow from Kalingrad's small airport.

Why would anyone bother making the trip — especially in the dead of winter? Because Rubchinskiy is one of the most important names in fashion now; and because, at the moment, Russia’s influence on the industry is so wide-reaching that one could only compare it to the turn of the last century, when Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes electrified the world. Beyond the ballet’s lasting impact on contemporary choreography and composition, it exerted an unprecedented influence on prewar fashion — its costumes became couture. Leaf through any fashion history book, and the Ballets Russes’ mark is apparent: After 1909, when the corps debuted in Paris, it was out with the pastels and the sinuous Art Nouveau lines of the Edwardian era, and in with bold color and exoticism. Most notably, Paul Poiret’s themes and decorative motifs were inspired by the designs of Belarus-born Léon Bakst, who created sets and costumes for the Ballets Russes. Bakst toyed with the brilliant contrasts of color in classic Russian embroideries, as well as the sarafan, a traditional folk dress whose shape he translated into tunics worn over trousers — a silhouette that, in 1912, became the wire-hemmed “lampshade” or “minaret” skirt in Poiret’s hands. Inspiring many followers, Poiret’s seemingly revolutionary designs — primary hues, harem pants, hobble skirts and oriental-inspired turbans alongside Cossack-style coats trimmed in fur and folkloric embroideries — originated on the Ballets Russes’ stage.

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