One of the cool things about Moscow is its ability to throw up ambitious young designers and the latest to capture the imagination is Andrey Repin, a fledgling talent whose clothes had a certain Hitchcockian quality.
But this is an Alfred Hitchcock whose next film project would be turning one of Mikhail Bulgakov’s moody and magical novels into a dramatic movie set along the banks of the Volga.
Repin, still only 27, is such a hatchling of a designer he couldn’t afford to create labels for any of the 23 looks he sent out onto the catwalk Friday evening in Moscow.
Yet his bias cut, lady-like and modestly volumed cocktail dresses made clear this guy has plenty of wit and imagination. Using Italian crepe and faded hues of lime, orange and silver, Repin created an imaginative moment, a tale of a remote heroine unexpectedly caught up in some drama. Call it East by Northeast.
Asked about the influences, Repin replied, “no actress in particular, but something off a Hitchcock screen.”
The weekend’s noisiest moment was certainly at the latest show by Masha Tsigal, a post Soviet “it” gal, whose father and grandmother where famed artists in the Communist era. Tsigal is one of Russia’s hippest designers, a sexy and smiling graduate of the world’s most famous fashion college, Saint Martins in London and whose shows attract local celebs and trophy wives.
Her take this season was saucy athleticism, in a show that opened with two buffed dancers prancing muscularly along the stage in Moscow’s World Trade Center, the nerve center of Russian Fashion Week, an eight-day season that features some 60 designers.
For spring 2009, Tsigal wants guys in Afghan jogging pants and Formula One fan short silk and nylon jackets to date flirty “devotchkas” (that’s girls in Russian and Clockwork Orange) in see-through paisley cocktails paired with boxing boots, the better to show of their knickers. If this collection sounds like it’s made for people with mega fit bodies that’s because it was.
Masha’s star was the pouting Oksana Robski, writer and talk show host, who had the 800 people packed into the show space roaring her on with each passage. Robski is the author of “Casual,” a dark tale of the “nouveau riche” in modern day Russia, obsessed with social climbing, affairs and Botox – a cast, in a word, which sat front row at this event.
The Saturday evening show may have started nearly two hours late, but nobody seemed to mind that much, since Tsigal had most of the audience on its feet when she took her bow, receiving the inevitable bouquet of flowers, a tradition at the Moscow shows.
Right after Tsigal, we were treated to a show by Dasha Gauser, an inventive tailor whose taut and structured collection of cocktail dresses was professional and, occasionally, rather stylish.
The collection was rather hit and miss with otherwise neat silk tubes rendered eccentric with protruding waistline fans and cantilevers, or a sex-in-the-ladies-room look with a mini dress that revealed far too much. But when Gauser got it right, as she did with a series of paneled cocktail dresses, her exotic Eurasian casting looked very fine.
Russian designers still tend not to be great tailors, but a select few know how to cut a fluid dress, which was the case at Chari, a new label by a Russian designer Maria Marnovo and her American partner Chris Kramer.
Their sleekly cut cocktails were the most commercially astute looks we saw all week, and proof that locals here can make chic and saleable fashion. No wonder they celebrated their success with an after party in Red Square, right across from Lenin’s Tomb. Even V.I. – a clotheshorse himself judging from his dramatic poses in all the statues of the leader that still dot this country – would have given his thumbs up.
The original article can be found here
