Stop! In the Name of the Fashion Police!

Irkutsk. Maybe it would be good to talk about it’s origins as a hangout for the ‘Decemberist’ dissidents, cast by the revolution into the wastes of Siberia. Or the fact it is soon to celebrate it’s 350th anniversary. Or the interesting juxtaposition of Karl Marx Street, with a statue of Lenin at one end and a newly restored statue of Tsar Nicholas II at the other. We could even mention that there has been a trial this week of cannibal Satanists (their ringleader was 22 and had just been kicked out of teacher training college). But let’s not; let’s be extremely shallow and talk about fashion.

Russian fashion is extremely interesting. I will freely admit that I know very little about fashion, and people in glass houses and all that. Irkutsk, cut off from the rest of the known universe, has distilled the quintessence of Russian and Eastern European trends. If you are a man, you must wear a powder blue polyester suit, or tight horizontally striped vest tightly tucked into stone washed jeans, topped and tailed with a mullet and pointy plastic shoes.

For women it’s a little more complicated. Hair can be peroxided or hennaed into the consistency of worn out brillo pads and left to explode outwards, the bigger the better. Make up must be electric blue or neon green for the eyes and scarlet for the lips. Dresses come in a variety of colours, but there is usually a nice helping of bronze, silver and gold mixed in. Hem lines are short, cleavages are de rigeur and frocks are accessorised nicely with diamante butterflies or bows the size of a child’s head. Shoes are always vertiginous heels in a range of metallic colours.

It is very shallow to judge anyone by what they wear, especially if you are a foreign observer, but the question that all these fashions raise is: did this fashion sense stop in the late 80’s, is it merely cyclical and this season is the 80’s revival, or have they only just now caught up to the 80’s?