Michail Voronin’s story is a rags-to-riches tale.
He started off as a lowly, teenage tailor at a Soviet clothing factory in the late 1960s. Some 30 years later, on March 5 of this year, he received the award for best trademark in Ukraine’s People of the Year awards.
Voronin’s knack for making suits is what got him to that plateau. From humble beginnings, Voronin rose to become the favored tailor for Kyiv’s political elite in Soviet Ukraine, before becoming favored tailor for the masses in independent Ukraine.
Voronin was always a man of lofty ambition. While slinging fabric by day as a tailor in a Kyiv factory in the late ’60s, he busied himself studying the nuances of the trade at the Kyiv Light-Industry Technology Institute by night. He established himself as one of the Soviet Union’s up-and-coming designers upon graduating in 1972, inventing and obtaining a patent for a new suit-tailoring method.
Voronin dutifully rose through the ranks of the Soviet fashion bureaucracy, and in the early 1980s became one of the top managers at the leading Kyiv clothes-designing factory, Inopshiv Odezhdy Factory No. 3. It was there that he developed his reputation as the favorite tailor of Ukraine’s power elite.
Voronin is hesitant to talk about that role today, preferring to concentrate instead on his current projects. But it was his early reputation as a sartorial maverick that allowed him to rise quickly to international fame when the rules of the Soviet fashion game began to change in the mid-’80s.
Perestroika and, subsequently, Ukrainian independence allowed Voronin and his colleagues at Inposhiv Odezhdy to first rent their factory from the state, then buy it out completely. Voronin dropped the factory’s Soviet moniker and renamed it Moda I Vremya (Fashion and Time).
Voronin quickly became a factor on the international scene. In 1989, Voronin put on his first personal exhibition in Hollywood, California. Two years later, Voronin formed Michail Voronin Vienna Paris, a joint venture with Austrian and French partners. The Moda I Vremya factory, which was absorbed by the joint venture, received a facelift courtesy of money pumped in by the foreign partners.
In 1994, Voronin bought up the controlling stake in a state clothes-making factory (which he renamed ‘Zhelan’) and launched a new company, also called Michail Voronin Vienna Paris but legally a separate entity from the joint venture. The new company not only manufactured clothes at the new factory, but also marketed and retailed clothes made both by the joint venture and the new company.
Zhelan had benefited 11 years ago from the addition of a state-of-the-art French production facility, built by a Finnish group. But its management structure remained strictly Soviet.
‘The biggest difficulty was changing the employees’ way of thinking and their attitude toward work,’ Voronin said. ‘It may sound stupid, but it took me almost two years to teach people not to cook soup on a Xerox machine or do some other unwise things.’
Voronin completely retooled the factory’s inner workings, resulting in, as he describes it, ‘a completely changed management and factory workers of whom I am proud.’
The French production facility aside, most of the factory’s Soviet-era equipment had to be replaced with German and French machinery. As a result, the plant’s equipment today is both efficient and environmentally friendly.
‘We had a new filtration system installed. It cleans everything including air and water,’ Voronin said.
But Voronin’s most important move as new boss at the factory was to improve the factory’s suits: ‘We simply could not sell the factory’s old suits – even at a 50 percent discount,’ he said.
Voronin launched a drive to instill in his newly retrained staff the creed of quality over quantity. The factory had once churned out 600 suits per shift. Voronin cut that number down to 500, even as the firm’s capacity increased with the introduction of the new equipment.
There’s one problem with producing quality suits in Ukraine, however: Few can afford to pay for quality. That sad reality has left Voronin looking abroad to market his surplus. Zhelan exports some 40 percent of the 12,000 suits it manufactures monthly, mostly to the United States. Voronin’s single U.S. distributor wholesales the suits in Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, New York and Chicago.
Voronin’s clothes have a reputation for being popular among Ukraine’s new rich. But Voronin says he targets people of ‘medium income.’ However, the economic crisis that hit last September robbed Ukraine’s gradually emerging middle class of its spending power, while forcing Voronin to raise the price of his suits, which today start at a still-cheap Hr 300.
‘All kinds of people visit our store, including new Russians and people of middle income,’ commented a store clerk at the Michail Voronin store on Zhylanska 54 in Kyiv. A glance around store, which was bustling with both gold-chain-wearing new-rich Ukrainians and more less flashy clientele, seemed to confirm his words.
Voronin has opened 25 stores across Ukraine and, by his own account, controls 55 percent of the domestic suit market. Still, he remains weary of the competition in Ukraine, which can benefit at any moment from a ‘boost’ from Ukraine’s notorious criminal structures or the government.
‘Competition in Ukraine is not easy. We do not have same competition as they have in the West. It is more like a world of wolves. You live in a forest and do not know from behind which tree a wolf will come out on you,’ Voronin said.
‘I do not know if I am in someone’s way, but I definitely do not have a green light in front of me,’ he said. ‘For example, on Khreshchatyk they sold all shop space to foreigners without giving any particular reason for doing so.’
Of course, there are those who would just as soon see Voronin’s suits off the streets.
‘There’s nothing new here,’ commented one photographer present at a recent Voronin fashion show in Kyiv. ‘All of [Voronin’s] stuff is just copied from France.’
But Voronin seems to have the respect of his peers in Ukraine.
‘The suits are good, the design is also good,’ said Irina Tkachenko, president of Kyiv fashion house Dom Modely Kreshchatyk. ‘I disagree wholeheartedly with [the photographer’s] comment. Photographers do not have the training to be making comments like that in the first place.’
No amount of criticism will faze Voronin from striving towards his eventual goal: ‘I want to clothe the whole Ukrainian population with cheap and high-quality clothes.’
