Street Fashion Moscow

Elena Siemens

Description

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 traveled 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.

 

 

Foreword

Eliot Borenstein

Street Fashion Moscow

Red Square and Surroundings

Gorky Park to the Hermitage Gardens

Winter on the Boulevard Ring

Beyond the Garden Ring

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Collections photographiques
• Photographie
• Techniques photographiques
• Photographie Créative
• Technique photographique
• Mode (habillement)
• Cultural Studies
• Regional
• Fashion
• Photography
• Region
• Index of urban studies articles
• Photojournalism
• Street Photography

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books
• Date de parution: 01 février 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781783206155
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

First published in the UK in 2017 by
Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2017 by
Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Copy-editor: MPS Technologies
Cover designer: Emily Dann
Production manager: Katie Evans
Typesetting: Contentra Technologies
Print ISBN: 978-1-78320-613-1
ePDF ISBN: 978-1-78320-614-8
ePUB ISBN: 978-1-78320-615-5
Printed and bound by Bell & Bain, UK.
Contents
Foreword Eliot Borenstein
Street Fashion Moscow
Red Square and Surroundings
Gorky Park to the Hermitage Gardens
Winter on the Boulevard Ring
Beyond the Garden Ring
Acknowledgements
References

Foreword
Eliot Borenstein
Can history ever keep up with the pace of fashion? And what does ‘fashion’ even mean when considering objects whose seasons can sometimes be longer than the human lifespan? A book on ‘street fashion’ must by necessity take architecture into consideration, and even Soviet buildings were intended to house the hopes and dreams of successive generations of tenants. One clear sign of the conjunction of history and fashion is irony, and there is irony potentially embedded in the very title of the wonderful book that you are about to read. Even a few years ago, ‘Street Fashion Moscow’ could have served as a punchline, or a shorthand joke along the lines of allusions to the East German women’s Olympic teams. Soviet (and particularly late-Soviet) clothing styles not only didn’t age well – they didn’t even fit their own times. The only way in which they were forward-looking is as fodder for the Internet memes of the Radiant Future. If you don’t believe me, take a minute to google ‘Meanwhile in Russia’, and then come back to this book. We’ll still be here.
Clothing is only the beginning of the story. Even within the vast confines of the Soviet Union, Moscow, while the undisputed centre of state power and economic might, was engaged in a constant rivalry with its smaller and younger sister, Leningrad. Though Moscow’s traditional architecture could lay greater claims to ‘authenticity’ (whatever that means) than the Italianate palaces of Leningrad, the simple fact that so much of old Moscow was razed by Soviet (and now post-Soviet) authorities puts it at an aesthetic disadvantage to the preserved (and, more recently, restored) splendour of St. Petersburg.
But Moscow, like many urban capitals, can be a site of constant aesthetic discovery. A Soviet-era monstrosity might have a centuries-old Orthodox Church nestled up against it. Nor can we discount the strange beauty of Soviet and post-Soviet monumental kitsch. As you pass by one building after another, the constant shifts in historical eras are dazzling. Indeed, Moscow is something of a palimpsest. From its medieval origins, it retains a street layout of concentric (if eccentric) rings around the Kremlin, a security measure that has the unfortunate modern side-effect of looking like a bull’s eye from the air. More recently, it added streets and highways that form, if not a grid, then certainly a set of dazzling deviations from the original circular structure.
It is on all these streets that Elena Siemens finds a wealth of material. Moscow is very much a city for walking, even if its scale and traffic laws do not render it entirely walkable. A flaneur with a still camera, Siemens directs her gaze at sights the busy pedestrian rarely stops to see. She does us all a great service, in that no single walking tour could ever do justice to such a city. Street Fashion Moscow approaches the Platonic ideal of the city walking tour, curating the best possible views for us as we sit comfortably at home.
Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917−1919 (Duke, 2000) and Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Cornell, 2007).
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 ironed shirt! A woman’s life all summarized in her dress, her entire life showing in the sufferings of a dress! A person’s drama conveyed by a coat!
(Wenders 2010: 14−15)
Clothes, Wenders sums up, ‘indicate the temperature of a picture, the date, the time of day, time of war, or time of p