Street Fashion Moscow

By Elena Siemens

Few cities in the world offer the diversity of stunning visuals that can be found on the streets of Moscow, from famous landmarks like Red Square to the Boulevard Ring and Kamergersky Lane and the residential areas beyond the Garden Ring. For this book, former Moscow resident Elena Siemens travelled them all as an urban flâneur, taking photographs of contemporary fashion in action and setting it alongside explorations of modern and historic representations of fashion and beauty as seen in a wide variety of products of Russian culture. Through her photos and analysis, Siemens considers the question of how contemporary Russians understand their post-Soviet identity and express it through the ways they present themselves in public.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Feb 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781783206155

Book preview

Street Fashion Moscow

Riding to a Christmas party, Yury Zhivago – the protagonist of Boris Pasternak’s celebrated novel Doctor Zhivago – admires the ‘ice-bound trees of the squares and streets’ and the ‘lights shining through the frosted windows’ (Pasternak 1988: 81). Inside the houses, ‘glowed the Christmas life of Moscow, candles burned on trees, guests milled and fooled about in fancy dress, playing hide-and-seek and hunt-the-ring’ (Pasternak 1988: 81). For this Christmas party, Zhivago and Tonya had their very first ‘evening clothes made for them’ (Pasternak 1988: 71). Watching her dance in her new dress at the party, Zhivago saw Tonya – his childhood companion – in a different light. Spinning next to him with ‘her unknown partner, she caught and pressed’ Zhivago’s hand; the ‘handkerchief she had been holding stayed in his fingers’ (Pasternak 1988: 84). It ‘smelled equally enchantingly of tangerines and of Tonya’s hand’ (Pasternak 1988: 84). ‘This was something new’ to Zhivago, ‘something he had never felt before, something sharp and piercing that went through his whole being from top to toe’ (Pasternak 1988: 84).

Lara – a ‘girl from a different world’ – arrives to the party uninvited (Pasternak 1988: 29). The most distinct item of her outfit is a fur muff. Following her husband’s death, Lara’s mother brought her children to Moscow, where on the advice of Komarovsky, a lawyer and business associate of her late husband, she bought a modest ‘dressmaking establishment’ (Pasternak 1988: 29). The shop came with noisy sewing machines, a cage and a canary, a staff of seamstresses and its own clientele. The clients gathered around a table ‘heaped with fashion journals’ (Pasternak 1988: 31). Discussing the latest styles and patterns, the women ‘stood, sat or reclined in the poses they had seen in the fashion plates’ (Pasternak 1988: 31). Komarovsky, who frequently visited Lara’s mother, startled ‘the fashionable ladies at their fittings so that they darted behind the screens coyly parrying his jokes’ (Pasternak 1988: 31). He soon had shifted his attention from the mother to the daughter. On the night of the Christmas party, Lara resolved to confront Komarovsky: ‘She walked through the festive streets in a terrible excitement, seeing nothing’; in her muff she carried her brother’s revolver (Pasternak 1988: 78).

Lara’s fur muff is faithfully recreated in David Lean’s iconic film Doctor Zhivago (1965). Starring Julie Christie as Lara and Omar Sharif as Zhivago, the film has won five Academy Awards, including the Best Costume Design by Phyllis Dalton. Lean’s film – with its haunting images of the snow-swept Moscow on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, and Dalton’s romantic costumes – produced a revolution in fashion. Most famously, it inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s 1966 ‘Cossacks Collection’, featuring fur, embroidery and lavish dress silhouette. Christian Dior, Valentino and Chanel, among others, also contributed to the creation of the ‘Zhivago look’. More recent examples of Russian-inspired fashion, dating from the early 2000s, include Karl Lagerfeld’s collection ‘Paris-Moscow’ for Chanel, ‘The Russian Line’ by Marras for Kenzo and collections by Roberto Cavalli, Valentino and Dolce & Gabbana.

Joe Wright’s sumptuous 2012 adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has brought a new wave of interest in the ‘Russian look’. Wright’s Anna Karenina, also awarded an Oscar for its costumes by Jacqueline Durran, captured the imagination of both high-fashion designers from Alexander McQueen to Chanel, and mainstream retailers, such as Banana Republic and Zara. According to Durran, Joe Wright suggested ‘that the costumes should be 1870s in shape but have the architectural simplicity of 1950s couture’ (Durran, quoted in Foreman 2012: 336). However, there was one scene where Durran remained faithful to Tolstoy’s text – a ball to which Anna defiantly wears a black dress, rather than the expected pastels. Tolstoy provides the following description of this memorable dress:

Anna was not in lilac, as Kitty was sure she ought to have worn, but in a low-necked black velvet dress which exposed her full shoulders and bosom that seemed carved out of old ivory, and her rounded arms with the very small hands. Her dress was richly trimmed with Venetian lace. In her black hair, all her own, she wore a little garland of pansies, and in her girdle, among the lace, a bunch of the same flowers.

(Tolstoy 1970: 72)

Commenting on Durran’s costumes for Anna (played by Keira Knightley), Amanda Foreman writes in her Vogue article: ‘The famous ballroom scene, where Anna makes Vronsky her conquest, has her dressed in a black taffeta-and-tulle gown that literally overpowers the soft pastels of every other woman present’ (Foreman 2012: 336). Foreman adds: ‘Later, when Anna is publicly ostracized at the theatre, Wright puts Keira in exactly the same dress, only this time in sparkling white, as though there is no place she can hide her shame’ (372).

Some landscapes ‘literally cry out for THEIR STORIES to be told’ (13), writes Wim Wenders, the director of such cinematic masterpieces as Paris, Texas (1984) and Faraway, So Close (1993). Wenders also acknowledges the ‘narrative power’ of props, as well as clothes (14). In many pictures, he states, clothes ‘are the most interesting part’:

A crisply