How does a 20 year old girl from Kostroma with no training in fashion design, start her own line of clothing and open a store in Moscow’s swanky GUM? You get Nashi to back you. As Marina Kamenev’s profile of Nashi designer Antonia Shapovalova explains, hooking up with Nashi can take you far. Farther than you ever imagined. Kamenev writes,
Shapovalova started her design career with Nashi three years ago, when the group came to her hometown of Kostroma. Shapovalova knew straight away that she wanted to take part. “They were offering a variety of roles like marketing, economics and education,” she said. “It seemed natural to do design, but I never anticipated this level of success.”
“Lots of journalists ask me if I completely support Nashi,” Shapovalova said. “I think it’s a stupid question. Nashi ideas are basic human principles. They support orphanages, education; they are patriotic, they are anti-fascist. What kind of normal person says they are pro-fascist?”
One shouldn’t be surprised that Shapovalova is a die hard Nashistka. Her Nashi connections, which of course mean government connections, has landed her a rent free space among stores like Dior, Calvin Klein, Zara, Levi’s and other international designers. “I wouldn’t say [Mikhail Kusnirovich, the director of Bosco di Ciliegi, which owns the controlling stake in GUM] is paying for me. It’s a collaboration with GUM and Nashi,” she told Kamenev. It doesn’t hurt to also have mannequins draped with your line throughout GUM, pop stars posing for photo ops, and State Committee of Youth Affairs and Nashi founder Vasili Yakemenko showing up for the store’s opening either.
“I am sure that in three years’ time every tenth young person in Russia will have something from Shapovalova’s collection in their wardrobe,” says Yakemenko. If only the Komsomol had this kind of vision.
Of course, Komsomol was born with a radically different vision. First ‘komsomoltsy’ were hounding and ostracizing their own comrades for any hint of accepting bourgeois modes and mores. In those early times, one could be thrown out from the Kollektiv for wearing mascara or stockings, with all the consequences thereof.
Even in the last years of the Soviet regime, the spirit of ‘uravnilovka’ still reigned supreme.
Anyone been to GUM and looked around? Are her designs good? That\’s my most important question
Nothing looked good in GUM when I visited in December 2006. The place was empty, almost deserted, unwelcome and unpleasant. Quite a contrast to any American mall in December.
There were no sales signs, as nothing was for sale. The general message was, you want to save money you don\’t come in here. There were no discount stores, no packed places for kids, no teeming and smelly food courts, no hordes of stupid teenagers, practically no life at all. Everything was suffy and stock up. There were more mannequins than people. Ugh.
Are you kidding? Not being like an American mall is one the things that makes GUM great. “no discount stores, no packed places for kids, no teeming and smelly food courts, no hordes of stupid teenagers” – yup, from that description it is exactly the place in which I’d like to shop.
Joking aside, in truth it is not a mall anyway, but since its revamp a few years ago more in line with Selfridges or Harvey Nicks in London. You wouldn’t go there to save money either, but you would go to get the latest designer gear – just like GUM, which has been hugely successful since it reopened, and in my view a good example of Russia doing something well. ie taking a run down old Soviet basket case department store and turning it into a place of high class retail therapy.
I confess, when it comes to getting “the latest designer gear” from places of “high class retail therapy”, I’m totally with the plebs.
Yeah, I did most of my shopping at outdoor markets run by people with worse russian accents than me.
GUM frightens me, but so do similar stores in LA. I much prefer TsUM, it’s in a nicer location, it’s kind of pretty to walk around, and it’s open and spacious.