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Denis Simachev,a rising star of Russian fashion

Moscow , At the recent menswear shows in Milan, Denis Simachev, a rising star of Russian fashion, showed a collection that focused on the country's antiheroes, telling a story of bare-knuckled thugs working casinos in what he called "badly put together gangster wear." Titled "Gop-Stop" -- which can only be translated as "bang-bang" -- the provocative spoof offered instructions on how to dandify the Russian Soprano: Add a little raccoon trim to a double-breasted jacket, put gold zippers on tweed trousers and line everything with a traditional red and black floral print usually saved for lacquered boxes. "What Simachev does is combine sincere patriotism with sophisticated irony," says Aliona Doletskaya, editor in chief of Vogue Russia. Simachev, 32, also creates what he calls living billboards -- Putin's image on pink T-shirts with floral borders usually reserved for religious icons, for instance, or images of the hooligan wolf from the Soviet Union's Road Runner-style cartoon, "Nu, Pogodi" ("I'll Get You"). His boutique offers T-shirts proclaiming "Oil Is Our Everything" in Russian, bracelets with kopeks hanging off them and sheepskin coats featuring the traditional Gzhel floral pattern. There will be more Gzhel when he shows his women's collection next week in Milan. "My roots are still Russian and I will never run out of Russian ideas," Simachev says. "But I think the clothes are international and understandable." Simachev has a workshop in a former gasworks factory here that employs 150 people and where he takes meetings in a felt yurt, replete with fur pillows. More than 40 boutiques carry his clothes in Japan, Europe and Los Angeles. His first Simachev boutique opened this year on Stoleshnikov Alley, Moscow's poshest pedestrian street. Today, in contrast, a parade of designers from Magnitogorsk in the Urals to Kiev, Ukraine, are creating small multi-brand boutiques in Moscow and the provinces and are showing their stuff at one of Moscow's two fashion weeks. When Vogue came to Russia nine years ago, it was one of the first fashion titles. Today Russian Vogue has 150,000 readers and lots of competition. L'Officiel has a successful Russian edition, as does Harper's Bazaar, and Russian magazines have begun to appear with names like Fashion Life and Style. The middle class has grown more resilient since the economically tumultuous 1990s, when women typically bought designer boots, jeans and perfume on the black market. In 2006, clothing and footwear sales in Russia increased 13 percent from the previous year to $5.4 billion, said Raphael Moreau, a clothing retail analyst with Euromonitor. (Luxury goods sales totaled about $3.5 billion in 2004, with $600 million coming from luxury clothes.) The growth is due, in part, to the increase in stand-alone boutiques, malls and other shopping complexes, in place of the traditional Russian markets. For instance, Ralph Lauren recently announced it will open two boutiques in Moscow in 2007. And sales of cosmetics, the luxury good for the masses, are predicted to increase from $5 billion to $15 billion in the next five years. On a recent afternoon, Simachev stepped over mannequins and talked over the automatic drilling in his new Moscow boutique, nestled above his 24-hour, semiprivate club. The shop and club are squeezed next to Herm?s and across from Louis Vuitton. Roman Abramovich, one of Russia's best-known billionaires and owner of the Chelsea soccer team in London, is rumored to be Simachev's primary investor. Simachev will neither confirm nor deny the gossip, which has been reported in the Russian press. (Designers here don't often reveal their patrons.) But his popular "Chukotka" collection, which paid tribute to the clothes of indigenous people in the Chukotka region, may have been inspired by Abramovich, the former governor of the region. Popular taste is changing, too, as shown by television anchorwomen who are brave enough to mix Chapurin with Chanel. From the early 1990s, when the first boutiques opened, Russians slavishly bought European brands and for the most part snubbed their own kind. But Russians are tiring of head-to-toe Dolce & Gabbana and are starting to mix Russian designers with their European favorites. This has all been good news for designers like Simachev, who flew to Paris in 2001 with a suitcase of "Russian spirit" clothes during Fashion Week and was politely told to leave. He tried again, and a Paris showroom thrust him on the stage. Simachev is probably the only Russian designer who has never had a ready-to-wear show in Russia. Sitting on a Lucite chair in her modern glass-box office, Doletskaya wonders if Russian design, despite its low profile in the last century, could reach a critical creative mass, much like Belgian design. Source : Nora FitzGerald

 

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