Gosha Rubchinskiy (Q4181)
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Gosha Rubchinskiy is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Gosha Rubchinskiy |
Gosha Rubchinskiy is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Gosha Rubchinskiy has enjoyed a yearlong homecoming tour, revealing his seasonal collections in cities across his native country, Russia, from west to east. Twelve months ago he selected the stark, strange, intriguingly anachronistic oblast of Kaliningrad, partially because it was once a piece of Germany. (At that show, Rubchinskiy introduced a collaboration with the German brand Adidas, which is ongoing.) Then in June he arced north to St. Petersburg, a city aglow in pale flowers and endless summer twilight. There, too, another highly publicized partnership was launched with Burberry. Those items hit stores just over a week ago; that association continues as well. And on Sunday, in “maybe” his final Russian stop, Rubchinskiy landed in wintry Yekaterinburg, Russia’s fourth largest municipality. It is located in the Ural region, and is famous for being the site of the Romanov executions. It is about two hours east of Moscow by plane. It’s so cold in Yekaterinburg right now that residents can walk across its Iset River, which is frozen as solid as the emeralds that were once mined nearby.Everything in this extended junket has referenced, in some way, Russia’s hosting of the 2018 football (soccer) World Cup. The natural overlap of Rubchinskiy’s skatewear—which bristles with youthful pluck and mildly sober nostalgia—and football kits is evident, though not necessarily in-your-face obvious. But other more nuanced inspirations have found their way into the designer’s beat, such as the emergent rave culture in St. Petersburg as the Soviet Union began to evanesce, for his Spring 2018 collection. In Yekaterinburg—Fall 2018—there were more contemporarily relevant touch points: the era of Boris Yeltsin, a man who was born near Yekaterinburg and who would become Russia’s first president in 1991, and symbolically moving through and on from the ’90s.In turn, Rubchinskiy suggested a consolidated warmongering coherence, yet without the aggression normally associated with militarism. The idea acted more as a semaphore; a banded youth, not ignorant of, but definitelydefiantof, the world’s powers that be. “It was thinking about uniforms. What is it for the new generation? We tried to build it for young people . . . because now, in Instagram, Internet time, all young people, they can be all together and know what’s going on anywhere in the world. They are . . . united under the same times, united by streetwear and music and whatever else,” said the designer.
15 January 2018
January in Kaliningrad this was not. Despite being, geographically, a mere 513 miles to the northeast, this was far, far from the westernmost Russian city where Moscow-born Gosha Rubchinskiy showed hisFall 2017 collection. St. Petersburg in summer’s ascent is sublime: Surging rivers ribbon their way through the old streets, the teal-and-gold livery of the Winter Palace gleams under a sun that scarcely sets, and lilacs pierce the open-air paths of Isaakievskaya Ploshchad. It is fantastical in scale, library thick in lore, and crisp despite the humidity from the nearby Gulf of Finland—enough to partially cure, say, the hangover of a red-eye haul from New York to Helsinki followed by a cramped puddle jump to Pulkovo Airport.Of course, St. Petersburg is a city with much greater and grander a history than Kaliningrad. Rubchinskiy was particularly interested in its somewhat more recent legacies of two divergent categories: football and electronica. Regarding football, it is acknowledged that soccer first took hold in Russia via St. Petersburg. During the late 19th century, British merchants began to popularize the sport here. It was the Brits who founded Russia’s very first football association, the St. Petersburg Football Club, in 1879. The Russians followed in 1897 with their own official debut group: the Kruzhok Liubiteley Sporta, or, translated, the “Circle of Sport Lovers.” Fast-forward 121 years, and Russia will be hosting the 21st FIFA World Cup in 2018. The event has inspired Rubchinskiy to bring his collection home and ink a collaboration partnership with Adidas, which debuted in Kaliningrad and carried on this evening in St. Petersburg. Next season will also be shown in Russia, in a yet-to-be-decided city—though, the designer admits, it won’t be Moscow.As for electronica, Rubchinskiy is an ardent fan of Timur Novikov, the artist and Warholianpeterburzheccredited with creating the first Russian rave just before the USSR’s collapse. Tonight’s show venue—the Communication Workers’ House of Culture on Bolshaya Morskaya Ulitsa—reportedly hosted St. Petersburg’s first-ever such event in 1989. Rubchinskiy picked the spot to invoke the “ghosts” of revelers past—an especially freewheeling, experimental crowd partying deep into the fading (and post-) Soviet night. “Football, music, nightlife, fashion—all help to unite people,” said Rubchinskiy, borderline reverentially, of his broader thinking.
The clothes, self-described as a “mix of sportswear with a nightclub rave feeling,” managed to blend Rubchinskiy’s fountainheads effectively; this collection had significant range and guaranteed general appeal, despite its subtly (but specifically) anthemic notes to its host city. This is the designer’s most valuable strength: He has, more acutely of late but throughout his nine-year career (yes, he’s been in business that long), used Russia as source material but given it a salable, globally naïf lean. Just don’t call it the “Eastern Bloc look,” anymore (more on this in a moment).
9 June 2017
Tucked on the southeastern toe of the Baltic Sea sits the Kaliningrad Oblast—a Russian exclave that doesn’t actually touch Russia Major; similar, say, to Alaska’s geographic relationship with the continental United States. To Kaliningrad’s north and east lies Lithuania; to the south, Poland. From near its namesake city, two “spits” of land span outward, flanking the dark Baltic like some kind of defensive anemone. This place was known as German (or East Prussian) Konigsberg, before July 4, 1946, when Stalin made it into the USSR (The Red Army had taken Konigsberg from Nazi Germany during WWII.) It was renamed for the Soviet president Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, who reportedly never stepped foot in the region. It’s where philosopher Immanuel Kant is buried. It’s where the current Russian president, Vladimir Putin, redeployed nuclear-capable arms last October (Kaliningrad, given its unique location and governance, has often been observed with tension by both “the West” and Moscow). And it’s where, today, Gosha Rubchinskiy showed his very strong Fall 2017 collection, which included a brand-new collaboration with Adidas.Before the why, the how, and the what: Around noon, a select group of Russian and international editors was taken to a site called the Mariners’ House of Culture. The room therein, with faded blue velvet chairs (mine might’ve had a cigarette burn in it) and gold and white drapery, exhibited the sort of spare irreverence for which Rubchinskiy has become famous. As the show started, the soundtrack—from lost-era speakers stationed at both ends of the catwalk—discharged voice-overs in Russian. It became clear that as each model made his lap, it was he who was speaking.“It’s a portrait of Russia now,” said Rubchinskiy of the monologues and the casting. Each mannequin hailed from somewhere in the federation, from Kaliningrad local to Siberia, thousands of miles to the east. “It’s a real way to show the country to an international audience. Some boys say, ‘I don’t know what to do in my life; I am just chilling and I have fun and I have skateboard.’ Others say, ‘I want to be an army service agent.’ Another says he wants to write a book.” Rubchinskiy’s friend and collaborator on the audio, a Moscow-based DJ named Buttechno, admitted a more ominous testimony: “One boy said he doesn’t want to die before he’s 25.”
12 January 2017
A change of scenery, a change of pace. The menswear designer invited by Pitti Immagine to stage a show in Florence for Spring 2017 isGosha Rubchinskiy. Moscow born, based, and somewhat obsessed, his collections thus far have unraveled his Soviet identity, nostalgically harking back to the time before the curtain fell, and immediately after. He’s offered branded sportswear like ersatz ’80s Russian Olympic gear, and reclamations of teenage clubbing attire from the mid-’90s. What would Gosha do in Italy, though?Firstly, he found “the only Soviet-looking building in Florence,” to borrow the words of his stylist Lotta Volkova—a tobacco factory in the high rationalist style, built in the ’30s and abandoned 15 years ago. Most of the building was derelict, the show staged in a courtyard bordered by stained concrete and smashed windows. It also provided the backdrop for a short film by Renata Litvinova—Rubchinskiy and Volkova also featured. The film was dedicated “To Pier Paolo.”Pasolini was the key inspiration for Rubchinskiy—the life and death of the man himself, as well as his creative output. He was a communist, for one, which no doubt appealed to Rubchinskiy’s Eastern Bloc fascinations (then again, so was Miuccia Prada). The sly undercurrent of sexuality that is so often evident in Rubchinskiy shows was here more explicit: The first model, bare-chested beneath a loose-cut pinstripe suit, could stand in for Pasolini’s teenage lover Ninetto Davoli, or Pino Pelosi, the 17-year-old hustler who confessed to his murder in 1975.If Rubchinskiy has referenced generations of Soviet youths in seasons past, these Italian ragazzi felt tied intrinsically to the reality of modern streets Rubchinskiy has contributed heavily to—namely, the streetwear-clad legions of contemporary menswear. The designer showcased multiple collaborations with a veritable closet of historically Italian sportswear labels—Fila, Kappa, and Sergio Tacchini. Each iteration, combining classic elements of the brand with Rubchinskiy’s own signature branding, had the feel of black-market counterfeits. Indeed, it was only after the show (upon inspecting labels, and asking the right people the right questions) that you could ascertain if those Canal Street–style sweatshirts with Fila’s serpentine logo and Gosha’s name stitched below in trademark Cyrillic were real or make-believe. Most plumped for the latter camp. More fool them.
There was also a hookup with Levi’s to create Gosha-brand denims and corduroy jackets.More than any of Rubchinskiy’s other collections, this linked to the idea of a wardrobe: sportswear-focused, sure, but aren’t many people’s entire lives geared up to athletic gear? The standouts in Rubchinskiy’s Italian debut were, surprisingly, the tailored pieces, rounding out his guy’s closet, offering his loyal customers something new, and maybe even securing fresh blood. The opening pinstripe, a pair of double-breasted velvet jackets, cut confidently broad of the body and wide in the shoulder, even had a touch of another leading designer to their swaggering shapes. Giorgio Armani. That’s something you never expected of Gosha. It was certainly something he’d never shown before.Last season, Rubchinskiy cited the end of a cycle, and the beginning of something new. Perhaps that means a move away from his usual stomping ground, both creatively and physically. The shift to Florence seems to have shifted his creativity. It kicked it up a gear.
15 June 2016
Cпаси и Cохрани. “Save and survive.” The words were printed across the invite to the Fall show of young Russian-born designerGosha Rubchinskiy—spelled Гоша Рубчинский, if you read Cyrillic. Even for those who don’t, that arrangement of characters means something—a Soviet bloc sports-tinged style that has won Rubchinskiy legions of followers. For Fall, however, he moved away, and on, taking over a disused theater and presenting a gaggle of schoolchildren dressed in proto-proletariat garb. Rubchinskiy stated that this collection marked the end of a cycle, but pulling away from athletic gear and toward something harder, tougher, more overtly street (rather than streetwear), it already felt like a new beginning.Rubchinskiy thinks back to his formative years often—he’s obsessed with youth, his own and others’, specifically through the prism of Eastern Europe. The “save and survive” statement is a classic fragment of Slavic cultural history: It’s engraved in old-Russian Slavonic inside rings, and on the back of Orthodox crosses, hung over the chest as a kind of talisman.The looks themselves expressed the same mantra—not through religion, but by referencing the attire of punks and skinheads, youth attired aggressively as a form of self-preservation. Punks may have set out to offend—to borrow the possibly apocryphal parlance of the late seventies, punks just wanted to be hated—but it was a case of attack being the first form of defense. Rubchinskiy’s tribe of kids—street-cast via Instagram and found in corners as far-flung as Australia, Finland, the U.K., Denmark, and throughout Europe—didn’t seem the aggressive types.Nor were the clothes: slightly oversize leather jackets, baggy pants hoiked too high, too-long belts tied too tight, with all the gangly awkwardness of adolescence engagingly intact. Rubchinskiy said the fonts that appeared as prints and intarsia knits were influenced by punks from the 1990s, not the 1970s—Marilyn Manson types. It’s a history that he lived, not a fantasy: Rubchinskiy was a teenager back then. He may well have seen the skinheads at Tam-Tam Club firsthand, a St. Petersburg nightspot from the mid-’90s in a former Communist Youth building, which Rubchinskiy cited as a specific reference.The clothes he showed today, however, weren’t the same as he would have found at Vasileostrovskaya metro station circa 1996. They also weren’t anodyne sportswear papered with prints and embroideries.
A series of sweatshirts and lumberjack shirts had a double-cuffed sleeve, allowing them to bunch or trail around the hands. Engaging, ingenious design—so simple, you wondered why no one had done it before. It’s exactly that kind of engaging ingenuity that will ensure the survival of Rubchinskiy’s talent.
21 January 2016
Gosha Rubchinskiy's one-note but highly evocative pitch is to recast the institutionalized ugliness of Soviet-era sportswear with a lovingly tender eye. Bright lime topstitching is a vile addition to any pair of trousers—yet somehow when you know it has been applied to cinched-ankle pants as an homage, rather than an act of casual tastelessness, the offense becomes strangely relishable. Aficionados of ironic sports-casual will, lucky them, adore this collection. For everyone else, only the straight-leg cotton pants, and, perhaps the TV astrologer, jazzily yarned sweaters will be cause to raise an eyebrow.Rubchinskiy may be niche—extremely niche—but he expresses his subdialect of choice brilliantly. You could absolutely imagine the stripe-flashed vests and high (too high for comfort) short shorts gracing the team of some accursedly oppressed consumer-goodsless territory at the Los Angeles Olympics. The Reeboks were a fine expression of philosophically hopeless footwear too. As mass fashion starts to wheel inexorably toward mining the 1980s for influence, Rubchinskiy seems perfectly poised to flourish. Comme des Garçons know-how and a sensibility as attuned as his to the queasy finer points of Aertex polyester should go far. This is absolutely not what Orwell was thinking of when he wrote1984, but in its own way this designer's version was just as dystopian. Horrible-lovely.
25 June 2015
Gosha Rubchinskiy excused himself from exegesis by saying he was too overwhelmed to talk after his show. Sweet. So it was an assistant who relayed that the wordsportwritten in Cyrillic and Mandarin, as well as the combination of the Russian Federation's and the PRC's flags on logo sportswear, were supposed to allude to tensions between the two superpowers. OK, sure—but that hybridized flag was also flanked up and down with two perfectly Tommy Hilfiger shades of blue.This entertaining collection saw street-cast models—some as young as 13—transformed into brand-hungry Russian youths of the immediate post-glasnost years, as seen through a Rubchinskiy prism. These were not oligarchs' sons. Their hair veered from buzz cut to mullet. They wore elastic-hemmed washed jeans with Carhartt-esque carpenter's loops, belted with shoelaces. Those hems were high enough to showcase street-market-ish, pack-of-three "sports" socks. The Gosha flag logo looked like a clumsy '90s counterfeit—not one of today's sophisticated rip-offs—on tracksuits pulled nastily high. Over these, or the occasional "sport" knit sweat or two-sided Russia vs. China soccer scarf, the models wore dad-style sheepskins or lumberjackets. As an evocation of a particular moment in time it was both accurate and a touch sad, a reminder of the days when customers at the newly opened McDonald's in Moscow would take their Coke cups and fries-holders home with them. How meta it would be if the world's coolest street-style retailers began selling logo sportswear that riffs on the naive black-market attire of back in the day. They probably will.
22 January 2015
Gosha Rubchinskiy, Russia's young street-inspired design star, already sells to a cool coterie of stores across the globe, but now he has joined menswear's elite by making his runway debut in Paris. This is due in no small part to Comme des Garçons. One of his first customers back in 2010 was Dover Street Market, which opened a corner for the post-Soviet brand in its London store, and in 2012, Comme des Garçons took on production and distribution.Staged in an under-construction space tucked into Paris' gritty 11th arrondissement, Rubchinskiy, 30, displayed the evolution of his skater style, which has grown up to encompass tailoring in leather and fur without losing its shorts and sweatshirt base. The designer has always considered his collection to be for Russia's post-1991 generation, those who grew up in the midst of a reawakening of religious roots in the post-Soviet boom-or-bust economy. He even named his first show in 2008 Empire of Evil, after Ronald Reagan's famous anti-Soviet speech. But while a few seasons ago Rubchinskiy's guys might have been spending most of their time in Gorky Park, today they're a bit flashier.For Spring, he offered a red-hot leather jacket cut to three-quarter length so it can double as a coat; fun bicolored-fur, single-button, double-breasted coats cut with a raw V-neck and modeled over bare skin; patchwork gingham and spring plaid shirts with oversize pockets; high-waisted white and baby-blue sweatpants; pale camo shorts; and old-school-style sneakers patched like abstract paintings. Besides the leather tailoring and fur, all the silhouettes are sport basic, but Rubchinskiy's high-waisted, narrow shapes and carelessly mixed, basic colors look like they come from a place the fashion world hasn't quite reached yet. The brilliant factor was particularly evident in beige canvas and bright blue jeans cut loose and drawn in at the waist with a shoelace belt—a quirky fit that appeared rough and rude, but was totally right. Canvas work jackets, styled with a test pattern of patchwork cubes across the back, looked cool and sophisticated, and Rubchinskiy's hot-pink work jackets and matching shorts shaped up like a tough-boy suit. This was a strong and focused breakthrough from a designer who knows how to balance simple and more complex pieces, to bridge street archetypes with innovation.
27 June 2014