End of cycle
The diagnosis is made: it is boring to sit for a week in one pavilion, where you can entertain yourself only for the twentieth time moving from one hall to another. Another thing is to participate in a beautiful and interesting game, with rules and a map, for precise movement along a given route. It turned out that the Moscow public was waiting for something like this in the spring of 2009.
The marathon called Cycles and Seasons by MasterCard lasted four days.
It all began in the Triumph Gallery with the presentation of the project "79/89/09" by Payam Sharifi and his project Slavs and Tatars with the support of the German magazine 032c. The editors in barefoot sandals, cold champagne, one bag of 2.55 for two square meters of small gallery space and an involuntary dress code - total black - are more than an encouraging start for a series of events, despite the seriousness of the presentation itself, the topic of which is Iran Revolution of the 79th year.
After Triumph, everyone left for Dashi Zhukova’s GCI Garage. And most of the guests went there for the second night in a row. All because of the opening party of the joint exhibition of Christian Louboutin and David Lynch, who flew to Moscow on this occasion. Their Fetish exhibition was also supported by MasterCard Favorites, so most of the foreign guests who came to Cycles and Seasons did not miss this event. Let us try to ignore the insignificant fact that the exhibition was more than modest. Imagine the building of Domodedovo Airport and the infamous tiny room in it for the most important losers of the planet - smokers. So: the airport is the Garage square, and the smokers' room is the Fetish exhibition. Therefore, most of the guests concentrated in the restaurant area and focused on dancing.
The next day, the actual thing for which everything was started was the show of Russian designers. The first was the show of Konstantin Gaidai. It occurred on the open area of the Winery. While waiting for the start, the guests went to bask in the nearest galleries, and it so coincided that at the same time, the exhibition of photographs of Bart Dors took place in the Victory Gallery. Before the show began, everyone was there, and Bart was happy about the number of unexpected guests who arrived. He hardly expected to see Alain Doletskaya at his exhibition.
The topic of the show is Gaidai - an ideal society during the times of the two great powers - the USSR and Germany of the 1930s, without trying to flirt with totalitarian aesthetics. The atmosphere, the mood of the show and the cool breeze — everything seemed to fit the style. The models, with their eyes lowered to the floor, and their hands folded in the back, walked along the asphalt podium in things of achromatic colors with a multitude of graphic elements — monumental forms of Kremlin stars, lightning as an association with aglet and eagles on prints.
The next location is the Red October factory, which is actively turning into a trendy exhibition space. In the gallery Baibakov Art Projects in a chamber setting, the women's collection of Varduhi Nazaryan was shown.
In the next room everyone was awaited by the presentation of dresses from Alexander Terekhov and a film about his collection, prepared by FIRMA.
After October, everyone went about their business - to change shoes or dine - in a couple of hours to meet again in an old mansion at the party Le Baron. More than a pleasant surprise - Mark Ronson (musician, DJ and producer Amy Winehouse), played his set before the French and the guys from Idle. Even those who were going to drop in there for just a couple of hours, remained to dance until the morning. So ended Friday night - dancing on the tables.
It was worth at least two reasons to get to the Gosha Rubchinsky show by four o'clock in the afternoon. First, of course, it was interesting to look at the evolution of the designer, and secondly, you would hardly ever be lucky to be at a show in the ... church. Sleepy, in sunglasses, without much enthusiasm, but in anticipation, everyone gathered at the church on Baumanskaya, which has long been functioning as ... a gym. It turns out that it happens. Upon learning of this, everyone calmed down a bit: Gosh didn’t take a sin, but someone else took it. Amen!
A couple of hours after the Rubchinsky show, everyone met again in a completely different situation - in the bourgeois Ritz Carlton Hotel, at the show of Sergey Teplov's women's collection. The concept of Teplova, developed over the years - black, supergenic images, hypertrophied forms and architectural shoes - had a pleasant effect on those present: the consciousness that had been shaken after the show in the church returned to an adequate perception of reality.
The night from Saturday to Sunday spread guests to different points of the city, even within the Garden Ring. Someone went on the birthday of Simachev Bar, someone went on the birthday of Adidas, but in the morning many participants of the marathon nevertheless met in Solyanka at the premiere of the party "Yudashkin + 2".
Sunday prepared the final demonstration of Nina Donis, which took place in one of the pavilions of the New Manezh, where now also the Fashion and Style exhibition is taking place in photography. Therefore, before the show, the guests were entertained by the director of the Moscow House of Photography, Olga Sviblova. Entertainment, of course, was dubious - everyone was tired and too sleepy to adequately perceive the information about the exhibitions by ear. But the strength for visual perception of the show, besides with blotches of bright colors, still remained. The girls who came to the show in clothes from last year’s Nina Donis collection were full of enthusiasm - either the outfits ended, or it was some tribute to the designer, which is unusual for Russian reality.
At the after-party of the show, which took place in Leon Cafe, there was no longer any fun. All ate, drank and quietly shared their impressions of past events - on this game Cycles and Seasons was suspended. After a few days, it’s too early to bring a serious result - whether European buyers are interested in the collection of Russian designers presented, what responses the editor of foreign magazines will write about the fashion vision in Eastern Europe - will become clear a little later. In the meantime, you can see the Purple magazine blog with lots of great pictures from Moscow or the Colette team blog.
___________________________________________________________________________
Photos from the party "Yudashkin + 2": ogalinskaya
Photo by David Lynch: microbe
Photo: a_kalabin