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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783206155 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Intellect Books Ltd |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 27 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Elena Siemens is associate professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada.
Read an Excerpt
Street Fashion Moscow
By Elena Siemens
Intellect Ltd
Copyright © 2017 Intellect LtdAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78320-615-5
CHAPTER 1
Street Fashion Moscow
Riding to a Christmas party, Yury Zhivago – the protagonist of Boris Pasternak's celebrated novel Doctor Zhivago – admires the 'icebound 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 peace' (15).
Anne Hollander's seminal study Seeing Through Clothes also addresses the relationship between 'clothes in the works of art' and 'clothes in real life' (Hollander 1980: xi). Hollander argues that 'the way clothes strikes the eye comes to be mediated by current visual assumptions made in pictures of dressed people' (xi). Surveying the representation of clothes from the Ancient Greeks to now, Hollander points out that starting from the twentieth century, photography and cinema have become 'the commonest media for figurative arts, and other, older popular pictorial modes now copy their effects' (xi). 'In the Western world', she states, 'people see themselves taking their places inside the accustomed frame of how things look – something most commonly learned nowadays from camera arts' (xii).
This observation equally applies to contemporary Moscow, where people also derive their fashion lessons from cinema, as well as photography and TV shows. Books continue to provide some inspiration as well; the inside of a Moscow metro car, with its passengers engrossed in reading, still resembles a library outlet. Evelina Khromtchenko, the editor in chief of L'Officiel Russia, defines Russian style as a composite of many diverse components. Khromtchenko's lavishly illustrated volume entitled Russian Style includes entries on, among other things, fabric, dishes, clothes, Fabergé jewellery, Avant-Garde art, icons, cosmonaut Yury Gagarin, the Ballet Russes, the Stanislavsky Method and Peter the Great. The book imposes no hierarchy of values. For example, the entry on the celebrated dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov is paired with that on 'Papaha' – a 'high, cylinder-shaped hat' (Khromtchenko 2009). The latter entry is illustrated with a still from Doctor Zhivago, depicting Tonya (Geraldine Chaplin) in a 'papaha' hat and a fur-trimmed coat. Similarly, the entry on 'Anna Karenina' is placed side by side with that on 'Pirozhok' – another traditional Russian hat that derives its name from the 'oval-shaped pastries' (Khromtchenko 2009).
Hollander's Seeing Through Clothes, Iris Marion Young points out, brings attention to 'the historical specificity of twentieth-century women's clothing standards and images conditioned by cinema' (Young 1994: 199). While 'the nineteenth century held an image of women's demeanour as statuesque, immobile,' the twentieth century, conversely, 'emphasizes the mobility of women in clothes' (Young 1994: 199). Young writes that according to Hollander, 'we seek to fashion ourselves in the mode of dominant pictorial aesthetic', and in this endeavour, the mirror offers us 'a means of representation' (199). 'Contemporary urban life,' Young continues, 'provides countless opportunities for us to see ourselves – in hotel and theatre lobbies, in restaurants and powder rooms, in train stations and store windows' (199). Young herself likes 'to catch sight of [her] moving image in a store window'; the mirror, she explains, 'gives me pictures, and the pictures in magazines and catalogs give me reflections of identities in untold but signified stories' (199).
Post-Soviet Moscow offers a wealth of reflecting surfaces. In the Soviet period, Kamergersky Lane – one of the key locations in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago – was renamed Art Theatre Lane in honour of the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT), Russia's foremost drama venue co-founded by Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. There was something museum-like about both the theatre and its surroundings – an impression intensified by the MAT museum located next door. Walter Benjamin, who travelled to Moscow in the 1920s, writes that Bolshevism has abolished 'free trade and the free intellect'; the cafes were 'thereby deprived of their public' (Benjamin 1985: 189). Benjamin finds some solace in Moscow's outdoor markets displaying 'the heroic Christmas roses', the 'peasant clothes with patterns, embroidered in blue wool, imitating ice ferns on windows' and the 'glistening candy-icing flower beds on cakes' (Benjamin 1985: 193). 'The Pastry Cook from children's fairy tales', he adds, 'seems to have survived only in Moscow' (193).
Following its post-Soviet reconstruction, coinciding with the MAT theatre's 100th anniversary in 1998, Kamergersky Lane became traffic free, its entire length populated by fashionable cafes and restaurants. Near the new Chekhov statue, also installed here during the reconstruction, I once photographed an attractive café patio, its atmosphere resembling a scene from a Chekhov play. In 'Accounts with life', the author Dmitri Prigov chronicles his visits to various cafes and restaurants at art galleries and museums from London to Moscow. In each instance, he diligently calculates an additional profit derived from the café's close proximity to 'high-art surroundings' (Prigov 1997: 402). With their attractive views of the landmark MAT theatre, cafes and restaurants on Kamergersky Lane reward the visitor with this additional profit as well. This area also offers a great opportunity for watching the fashionable world go by.
Just a short walk from Kamergersky Lane is the headquarters of Condé Nast Russia, where I met with several editors of Glamour Russia. Like its western counterparts, Russian Glamour, the editors pointed out, strives to represent at least some examples of street fashion. Each issue includes a feature entitled 'Express' – a collage of photographs, depicting street fashion from both Moscow and abroad. Moscow, I was told, favours more extravagant and sensual clothing. High heels are a must. In contrast to this agenda, the editors dressed stylishly but rather understated. I scored my picture of the extravagant, or, more accurately, eccentric fashion on the same afternoon, just before my interview at Glamour. The editors identified my 'lucky find' as Danila Polyakov – a former model, who in the early 2000s worked with prominent designers from John Galliano to Ann Demeulemeester. On the day I photographed him, Polyakov dressed like a fashion nomad carrying a wicker basket. He was talking to a beggar and agreed to be photographed on the condition that I give some money to his downtrodden interlocutor.
To a foreign eye, Moscow street fashion might appear rather exotic – especially during the winter months, when every second passer-by sports an impressive fur hat, or a fur coat, or both. In Russia, wearing fur is practically a necessity, as well as a fashion statement. Every winter morning, Nikolai Gogol writes in his classic 1841 story 'The Overcoat', the civil servants of St Petersburg (then Russia's capital) must confront a 'mighty foe', namely 'our northern frost' (Gogol 1985: 310-11). It is a 'foe', Gogol elaborates, that spares no one: 'even those in the higher grade have a pain in their brows and tears in their eyes', let alone 'the poor titular councilors', who, dressed in their 'thin little' overcoats, are left utterly 'defen seless' (310). I took some of my best photographs of people in fur hats and fur coats near Café Vogue, located across the street from the elegant TSUM department store with its large selection of beautifully crafted fur clothes. At the Café Vogue, I was not allowed to photograph customers. The stylish waiters, who happily posed for pictures, revealed that there was no formal connection between their café and Vogue magazine. Nevertheless, the café's refined interior, its fashionable clientele, as well as its exquisite menu, corresponded well with the magazine's highbrow aesthetic.
Like its sister publications elsewhere, Russian Vogue tends to shun the outdoors in favour of studio photography. A good example of this is the magazine's June 2013 issue with a cover featuring Dasha Zhukova – an international celebrity and the founder of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow. Created by Patric Demarchelier and Fabian Baron, the image depicts Zhukova against a striking but indiscernible backdrop resembling an abstract painting. In her guest-editor introduction, Zhukova discusses her fascination with daring artists, who mix 'the simple and the complicated, the high and the low, the beautiful and the ugly, drawing inspiration from the mass culture' (Zhukova 2013: 48). She refers to Anthony Gormley and John Baldessari, both exhibited at Garage, as well as the conceptualist Ilya Kabakov, another frequent contributor to Garage. However, her cover portrait hardly seems to fit Zhukova's stated interest in the mass culture and the mix of the high and the low. The city of Moscow (and Zhukova's own Garage Museum located in the popular Gorky Park) falls outside the picture's frame.
For this project, I photographed Moscow from the point of view of a 'walker'. According to Michel de Certeau, who coined the term in The Practice of Everyday Life, the 'walker' perceives the city from a sidewalk, or, as de Certeau puts it, from 'down below' (de Certeau 1984: 93). De Certeau contrasts the 'walker' with the 'voyeur', who, conversely, '[disentangles] himself from the murky intertwining daily behaviours', observing the city from rooftops and towers (93). Although it offers some distinct advantages (being able to observe the entire city at a glance, for instance), the latter perspective does not come natural to me, especially when I photograph Moscow, my former hometown. De Certeau informed my Theatre in Passing: A Moscow Photo–Dairy, as well as its companion volume Theatre in Passing 2: Searching for New Amsterdam. I have returned happily to de Certeau and his 'walker' in this project, focusing specifically on the street and street fashion.
Working on this book, I have discovered likeminded photographers, including David Bailey, whose famous image 'Jean Shrimpton, Tower Bridge' (1961) depicts a model on the cobblestone sidewalk leading up to Tower Bridge. The model is wearing a man's trench coat, which, Ian Jeffrey notes in The Photobook, 'looks as if it might have been borrowed from the film stars Jean-Paul Belmondo or Humphrey Bogart' (Jeffrey 2000: 31). 'Bailey's relationship with fashion is ambiguous', Annabel Brog points out in Elle magazine (Brog 2014: 266). She quotes Bailey himself: 'Most fashion photography to me is like window dressing. They make a big set, they put a bird and a zebra and an upside down Jesus, and stick a girl in the middle' (Bailey, quoted in Brog 2014: 266). Bailey has been critical of Richard Avedon, whose well-known photograph 'Dovima with Elephants' (1955) places its elegant Dior-clad model between two elephants. 'My own style is nothing', Bailey declares, 'I just want very sophisticated passport pictures really [...] – which are quite hard to do!' (Bailey 2013). According to the fashion designer Paul Smith, Bailey 'really moved the dinosaur that was formulaic fashion photography into a new era of spontaneity' (Smith, quoted in Bailey 2013). Smith adds: 'Cartier-Bresson had mastered the "caught moment" of someone drinking coffee or crossing the road, but Bailey did the same with fashion' (Smith, quoted in Bailey 2013).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Street Fashion Moscow by Elena Siemens. Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
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Table of Contents
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,