The words "cool" and "cult" are entering the glossary of the most abused fashion terms, becoming aggravating factors and sources of exasperation in the industry. It seems indeed that if you can be described as a "cool" and "cult" label, you're a genius making a radical statement, no matter if you're re-vomiting an undesirable past or manufacturing banal designs of dubious quality.
Critics are for example raving and ranting about Gosha Rubchinskiy, currently one of the hottest designer in menswear, despite the fact that most of us don't know the exact reasons why he is defined so (but we're probably too old and unhip to guess them…).
After his debut at Pitti last season in collaboration with Fila, Kappa and Sergio Tacchini, the designer opted to showcase his new collection during an off-schedule show in Kaliningrad, along the Baltic Coast, next to Poland and Lithuania, a city that will also be among the locations for the FIFA World Cup in 2018.
Rubchinskiy grew up in post-Soviet '90s Russia and, as a teenager, was in love with the logos and brands of the West, so he has a passion for looking back at those times and at the Western wardrobe staples that weren't commercially available to him at the time.
For his latest collection the designer launched a collaboration with Adidas consisting in tracksuits with the brand logo and the word football or Gosha's name in Cyrillic (Гоша Рубчинский).
The collaboration came from the fact that there was a strong connection between sports teams in Russia and the German brand (besides Adidas will be among the FIFA World Cup sponsors, so expect further collaborations...). The choice of location also pointed at Germany since Kaliningrad was known as Königsberg when it was part of the Prussian Empire and until the Red Army took it from Nazi Germany during the Second World War.
The show at a former stock exchange that worked as a youth cultural center during the Soviet era, also included utility jackets, high-waist jeans, football-inspired t-shirts, sweatshirts, and, well, ordinary clothes mainly modelled by a group of young guys cast from all over the Russian Federation (from Instagram, as you do in this cool cases...) who didn't look too different from the disenfranchised youth of the world. The models talked about their inspirations, hopes and ambitions in interviews mixed with the background soundtrack.
For a change there weren't any hammers and sickles in view this time (of the sort that Kim Kardashian has started favouring without understanding the political implications behind such symbols – mind you, in her case it's a hoodie by Paris-based label Vêtements that sells for €660 or $700 and not a Rubchinskiy design...View this photo), but Rubchinskiy tried his hand at tailoring (though with a military twist about it as the green shirt and trousers proved) to present a more polished idea of casualwear or show there is an evolution in his style.
There was an art influence in the collection as the final trio of sweaters decorated with Suprematist figures and colours à la Kazimir Malevich proved and some designs were matched with newsboy caps by Stephen Jones.
This show confirmed that the streetwear trend is becoming homogenized: on the British runways you get neds in designer clothes; on the Russian ones you may see "gopnik", that is disenfranchised juvenile delinquents from the suburbs. But in both cases the clothes are the same and they are devoid of any deeper political meaning.
With these clothes Rubchinskiy isn't responding indeed to capitalism nor making a statement for his beloved young fans and against Putin's Russia (as for President-elect Donald Trump the young designer told US Vogue he finds him a strong person...), but he is clearly showing he has a deep-set nostalgia for polyester shellsuits.
In a nutshell, these are clothes for "Gosha heads", that is young consumers who look and think like him and who worship at the altar of the cult à la Demna Gvsalia of Vêtements (Rubchinskiy himself opened the Vêtements S/S16 show in the infamous DHL T-shirt), and at times you seriously wonder if Rubchinskiy is taking the piss, maybe delving into the discounted stock from Kappa & Co from eBay and reassembling it on the runways after sprinkling upon it some healthy doses of cool factor.
There's something uncanny here, though: who could have ever guessed that by looking at the images of a runway show in Kaliningrad or visiting a showroom in Paris (this collection will be on view at the Comme des Garçons showroom in the French capital as the brand is produced and distributed by CdG), I could have missed Glaswegian neds? At least they seem to be more genuine than their trendy counterparts sashaying down the runways of this sad and trendy world.
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