Moscow Fashion Week: Positively Political

“She was carrying these revolting, disturbing yellow flowers. God knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out very distinctly from her black spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers!”

—Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

In her hands, the woman was carrying a bunch of pink tulips. Not yellow. These were for a friend who was showing at the fourth edition of the Moscow Fashion Week in March. Yellow flowers in Russia symbolise sadness and betrayal. It could mean dissent. One must be very, very careful here. She had worked in London before but had returned to the motherland a few years ago.

“Yes, there is a war out there. We shouldn’t speak about the war here,” the woman in the black spring coat said while smoking her cigarette outside the Manege Central Exhibition Hall near the Kremlin in Moscow. It was already evening. She disappeared in the crowd later. Bulgakov라이브 바카라 classic is about the devil라이브 바카라 arrival in Moscow in springtime. As with other Russian masters like Dostoevsky, Bulgakov was both loved and feared by the powers that be. This spring, a model sported white-blind contact lenses on the runway, a faux devil incarnate. This is how fashion arrived in springtime in Moscow.

There were a lot of flowers in Moscow this spring despite sanctions against the country by the European Union in 2022 that prohibited EU member states from exporting flower bulbs and nursery stock products to Russia. Everywhere, people were carrying flowers. On the runway, designers were greeted with bouquets. Sanctions or no sanctions, the Moscow Fashion Week extravaganza was enough communication to suggest all is well in Russia.

The Moscow Fashion Week, held from March 13 to 17, was a placeholder of such cultural diplomacy and Russia라이브 바카라 relationship with friendly countries like China and India.

It was a “politically correct” runway.

The term “political correctness” was first used in 1917 by Marxist-Leninist affiliates during the Russian Revolution to signify obedience to the party line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Long after communism라이브 바카라 cancellation in Russia in the 1990s, the party line still dictates everything. Fashion, too.

The Russian government insists that the war be called a “special military operation.”

In Russia, the “war” is a state of being. Sanctions against Russia—which run into hundreds—imposed after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, don’t seem to affect anything here in Moscow. At least, not to an outsider who is an attendee of the fashion week with deliverables, which translates into favourable articles.

Moscow is a disorienting place. Its runway, even more so.

Everything speaks. Directly and indirectly.

On the runway, the models, on the fourth day of the fashion week, walked in a single file, their faces and limbs masked in red, like perhaps the many foot-soldiers of the Red Army, for the Moscow-based Cosarêve show.

In a country where everything is watched or so they say, the designer, whether intentionally or otherwise, used subversion as a means to channelise ambiguity, which is contextual. Faceless is a socio-political state of being everywhere and in the Russian Federation, which stands for many negations of beliefs that the “West” has promoted; there are many ways to look at fashion. There is always the designer라이브 바카라 concept note or the press note, explaining the inspiration, material and craft used. Careful, sanitised ones.

But there is always what라이브 바카라 invisible or hidden. Like the face here. Or identity itself. It could be a resistance to an overdose of beauty. Or it could be the celebration of the colour of the national flag of Russia, to do away with notions of individuality and present a case for a collective patriotic identity. The Russian mentality has been shaped by decades of collectivism. Alone is not something that Russians take to easily.

Facelessness is now addictive everywhere because it is political, mysterious and also seductive. The faceless is also fearsome and fearless.

Many fashion labels have worked with the faceless concept in the last decade across the world for different reasons. French luxury house Maison Margiela did it to make a statement against the personality cult of supermodels.

The mask is a barrier. It is a protection. It is also a defiance of facial recognition in a society obsessed with control and censorship where all dissent is punishable. It could also be the gateway to a faceless future where the cult of personality is dissolved for the greater good. Russia has always insisted on sacrifice in wartime. Bulgakov writes in his classic, The Master and Margarita, “No ID, no person.”

And in Russia, wartime is a state of being.

Everything speaks for something. That is, if you are willing to go beyond the narratives that are called press notes.

Like the holes in the mufflers and jumpers at Russian designer Alexandr Rogov라이브 바카라 show on the first day of the fashion week. There was the 80s nostalgia. There was a dazed kind of look, yellow lipstick, oversized blazers and patent neon heel shoes and red stockings. There were also a lot of holes. Rogov is a popular designer here who goes by his own rulebook.

At his show, the waif-like models walked nearly in a trance with their hair almost dishevelled, faces with a bleached-out kind of look and in patent leather boots in pink and green and red. Plaids, tartans and stripes. Extended and exaggerated shoulders, oversized blazers paired with loose pants or red stockings with a greenish long velvet overcoat. A splash of colour, a bold statement in torn edges or holes in garments signalling not just sustainability but also, the times that are fractured and identities that are torn or the woven folklore in traditional Russian knitwear that emphasised nostalgia for the old days of what was then called the USSR.

Despite the new boldness that was seen in IMKMODE라이브 바카라 use of leather in unconventional ways and whited-out eyes to create a surreal effect, Russian fashion is still shaped by its contentious place in the world, where many see the Russian Federation as against individual freedoms that are so coveted in the US and in Europe. But such simplistic views are often collapsed when confronted with the complexities of history and culture. It is the conflict and its history and isolation that make the fashion scene here very distinct. Like Russian literature that countered the state, the fashion here is now exhibiting its potential in challenging censorship and policies regarding gender and sexuality. While “Russianness” remains at the core of all designs, it is the concept of identity that is being formulated once again. Streetwear, that Moscow Fashion Week is best known for, is partly inspired by the aftereffects of war and deprivation. The paradigms of femininity are again shifting in a post-Soviet Russia where conservatism lost ground to glamour and now, self-realisation and feminism are driving a lot of fashion. While softer silhouettes in silk were paraded, there were designers who used the runway to challenge gender binaries, like Rogov did. It was Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy who tapped into the freedom of dress after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. His appropriation of the working class of Russia can also be seen as a way of embracing the struggle of the youth and in that, his streetwear became very distinctly Russian, very significantly political and very Eastern Bloc.

There was restraint, and there was the euphoria of colours on the runway, where the soft power of fashion was again harnessed to promote the Russian Federation라이브 바카라 narrative and to say that, in isolation, we thrive as we always have. That was Moscow resetting fashion, showcasing its cultural might, manifesting its ability to embrace transnational fashion and its aggressiveness and ambition in promoting the Russian viewpoint in the post-socialist period. Fashion is political and the runway a space for representation in order to pave the way for the formation of loyalty and sympathy towards Russia.

Fashion diplomacy isn’t new. The Cold War propaganda on both sides to cancel each other has only mutated and evolved.

The fashion industry remains one of the most globalised trades and can pretend to be many things and not just commerce. The Moscow Fashion Week can testify to that. Fashion diplomacy is a known phenomenon. The Cold War propaganda is well documented.

It was during the 2010s that the Western fashion industry started to establish itself in the Russian market because of the new wealth during the age of Perestroika. Fashion magazines like Vogue came in as mediators and Russian fashionistas became that bridge. In 2022, Vogue Russia made an exit. The Moscow Fashion Week was at first an initiative by Mercedes Benz that started in 2000 as an alternative event in response to the Big Four fashion weeks in London, Paris, New York and Milan. In 2022, the German company pulled out like Vogue Russia. Like the many luxury brands that cancelled on Russia then. Now, the Moscow Fashion Week is completely Russian. In showcase and in sponsorship.

Around 25 journalists from across the world had been flown down to Moscow and put up in the historic Metropol Hotel that serves caviar and champagne at breakfast in a ballroom with an artist playing the cello. Mercedes cars lined up outside for what they call “transfer,” and delegate managers, fluent in English, were assigned to the foreign media personnel to take care of anything they might need. Tours to the Kremlin and the Bolshoi Theatre, along with a luncheon at a yacht, were part of the itinerary.

The choice of countries from which the media had been invited was obvious. Friendly countries for now. Like Turkey. Like Nigeria, South Africa. Like Argentina and Andorra. Like India and Pakistan. No journalist from the European Union. No American journalist. There were many designers from other countries like China. Even America.

There was one unspoken pact. No politics. In an all-expenses-paid press trip, which has long been a contested tradition in the fashion industry because of its ethically fraught nature, one is expected to give “positive coverage” and not ask too many questions about the general state of the place.

One must experience complete disorientation at first and then, look beyond the familiar to adjust to a place that doesn’t work in the ways the West is used to. For many, Russia is still a communist place. State capitalism, which is denied by President Vladimir Putin, seems to be the order now. The fourth edition of the Moscow Fashion Week mixed streetwear with resort wear and with the grand outfits that invoked aristocracy and grandeur. In all of this, the theme was patriotism. Another unspoken rule. Folklore, fairytales, Russian textiles and crafts, ambition and irreverence marked the runway. All glorious stories. It is Putin라이브 바카라 Russia. Not Dostoevsky라이브 바카라 Russia. No despair. Only defiance.

But there is more than what meets the eye. Always.

One needs to understand the Russian virtue of “stoykost”, which means the capacity to endure endless suffering without giving in. The fashion week took it beyond. You are to celebrate the suffering, obliterate any mention of it and make it seem it doesn’t even exist.

Gregory Carleton, in his 2017 study Russia: The Story of War, says that war is what defines the national identity in Russia.

Russia has long grappled with identity and isolation and fashion simply draws from the culture around it. If nationalism and militarism are present, they will find their way into fashion and design. Designers across the world draw from their cultural heritage and nationalism, like Nargis Zaidi and Samant Chauhan from India, who were among the international designers showcased at the Moscow Fashion Week. The head of the Fashion Design Council of India, Sunil Sethi, got Khadi India–Centre of Excellence for Khadi, established by the Khadi and Village Industries Commission, the Ministry of MSME, to showcase a collection that reimagined khadi, handwoven and handspun in India and a political symbol of self-sufficiency first promoted by Mahatma Gandhi and now by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The ”deliverables” by journalists from across the world have been very favourable. Moscow is worth the little push. It is grand and mysterious. Luxury brands, at least some of them, are back. There is the romance of “otherness” that Russia promises. It is an exotic place.

It is also an opaque place.

While the runway at the Moscow Fashion Week showed patriotism, the integration of the federation with designers from the republics of Buryatia, Dagestan and Yakutia, amongst others, luxury, and the glory of the aristocracy and Czarist magnificence, it also showcased defiance, the deviant, the real and the surreal.

Like the model who walked in a leather ensemble with blind white contact lenses at IMKMODE라이브 바카라 show.

In Russia, you turn a blind eye. That라이브 바카라 a political statement. Like leather that stands for rebellion, independence and toughness.

Because it is always wartime here. And everywhere else.

Chinki Sinha is editor, outlook Magazine