By Yulia Tulegenova
There was a moment, on the first evening of Moscow Fashion Week, that crystallized the entire event. As the sun set behind the Kremlin’s blood-red walls, casting long shadows across the Floating Bridge in Zaryadye Park, a model walked out in a coat of impossibly vibrant, emerald-green fur. The air was cool, but her presence generated its own heat. She moved with a slow, deliberate confidence, and the impeccably dressed attendees watched with a kind of fixed, almost challenging, intensity. In that moment, it was clear that this was not really about clothes. It was a performance of power.
To attend Moscow Fashion Week in 2025 is to step through the looking glass. While the fashion ecosystems of London, Paris, and New York are wrestling with anxieties about sustainability, cultural appropriation, and the moral complexities of luxury, Moscow has chosen a different path. It has chosen to be beautiful. It has chosen to be opulent. And it has chosen to do so with a defiant, almost theatrical, indifference to the conversations dominating the rest of the world. What I witnessed was not a fashion week in the conventional sense. It was a state-sponsored performance of defiance, a beautifully crafted, and deeply unsettling, piece of cultural propaganda.
The State as Stylist
The first clue is in the staging. The choice of venues - the ancient Kitai-Gorod wall, the panoramic views from Zaryadye - was no accident. These are not neutral spaces. They are symbols of Russian history and state power, and their use as a backdrop for fashion week was a deliberate act of branding. It lent the collections a weight, a sense of national significance, that they might not otherwise have possessed.
The official narrative, eagerly reported by state-friendly media, was one of international collaboration, with designers from China, Brazil, and South Africa presented alongside their Russian counterparts. This, too, was a performance - a carefully curated vision of a new global order, a coalition of the aesthetically aligned. But beneath the surface, the event felt profoundly insular. It was a conversation Russia was having with itself, about itself.
The clothes, in this context, became the script. And the story they told was one of unwavering confidence and unapologetic luxury. The dominant trends were not so much stylistic choices as they were political statements.
The Armour of Opulence
Minimalism is dead in Moscow. It has been replaced by a maximalism so complete, so all-encompassing, that it borders on the surreal. This was an aesthetic of accumulation, a philosophy of "more is more" that felt like a direct rebuke to the restrained, "quiet luxury" of the West.
Take the omnipresence of fur. In London, the use of real fur on a runway would trigger protests and a barrage of negative press. In Moscow, it was celebrated. We saw it in every conceivable colour and form, from classic stoles to wildly impractical, shaggy coats in shades of fuchsia and crimson. This was not a quiet nod to tradition. It was a loud, deliberate rejection of a Western ethical consensus, a declaration that Russia plays by its own rules.
The same could be said for the blinding profusion of sequins and feathers. Designer after designer sent out clothes that shone, glittered, and shimmered, creating a relentless spectacle of light. Alena Akhmadullina’s collection, with its feather-covered garments inspired by the Firebird of Russian folklore, was a particularly potent example. It was a beautiful, almost mythic vision, but it was also a form of strange branding, wrapping a modern commodity in the comforting, unassailable cloak of fairytale.
This relentless ornamentation felt less like a celebration and more like a form of armour. It was as if the clothes were designed to dazzle, to distract, to create a surface so brilliant that one would be discouraged from looking too closely at what might lie beneath. It felt, at times, like witnessing a grand ball on the eve of a revolution - a beautiful, brittle, and perhaps final, performance of power.
A Manufactured Nostalgia
Even the silhouettes told a political story. The return of the corset, seen at brands like Gapanovich and SOL, was framed as a rejection of the shapeless, androgynous forms of oversized streetwear. It was a return to a more traditionally "feminine" silhouette, a reassertion of a conservative visual order. This, too, feels significant in a country where traditional values are a cornerstone of state ideology.
Running parallel to this was a strange, almost cinematic, nostalgia. The cut of a particular fur collar, the severe line of a tailored suit - these details often seemed to recall a romanticised vision of the Soviet past. Not the grey, bread-line reality, of course, but the aspirational glamour of Soviet cinema, the image of a powerful, self-sufficient empire. It was a highly selective, and highly effective, use of historical aesthetics to bolster a contemporary narrative.
Of course, it would be simplistic to dismiss all of this as mere nostalgia. There was real artistry on display, and many of the collections were, on a purely aesthetic level, genuinely beautiful. The craftsmanship was often superb. But the context is inescapable. Art and fashion do not exist in a vacuum, and in Moscow, the vacuum has been filled entirely by the state’s narrative. The designers, whether willingly or not, have become actors in a much larger production.
What was missing from the week was any sense of dissent, of subversion, of the questioning spirit that gives fashion its creative energy. There was no grit, no irony, no acknowledgment of the messy, complicated reality of the world outside the gilded cage of the runway. Everything was beautiful, and everything was fine.
I left Moscow with a sense of profound unease. I had seen beautiful clothes, yes. But I had also seen the mechanics of a sophisticated cultural project, one that uses the seductive power of fashion to project an image of strength, stability, and defiant isolation. The question is not whether the clothes are beautiful. The question is what that beauty is being used to hide. The brilliance of the sequins and the softness of the fur cannot entirely obscure the hard, unyielding reality.
