Some life journeys cannot be put into words. Think ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov, French actress Catherine Deneuve, Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Looking at these history makers featuring in the latest Louis Vuitton (LV) advertising campaign, their talent, mastery and experience comes to mind.
But watching young women in front of the Kyiv Opera House the other day with the same crafted LV carry-on bags, leaves an aftertaste of pretense and lack of class. Heaving an empty, big, monogrammed bag – the same one that Baryshnikov or Sean Connery use to travel with – to the theater is akin to wearing a playboy bustier to your granny’s birthday dinner. It clashes with “core values,” a key message of the LV campaign.
Ukrainian men and women’s sartorial styles are all but boring. Concoctions of feathers, crystals and smoky eyes wander Kyiv streets and beyond in broad daylight. It’s hard to say what’s in fashion this season just by observing a particular age group on the street. Economic disparity, Soviet history and “where’s the party” type of outfits sadden, bewilder or freeze one in awe.
Just as LV girls jar with theater, older people often look at odds wearing Western shirts with inscriptions in English. My winner in the funny t-shirts category so far this year is a 50-year-old museum guide whose top said “Giving is half the fun.” She was clearly clueless about what it meant. The runner-up is an elderly man in a FCUK t-shirt feeding chickens in his yard. The army of New York Yankees fans in Ukraine is probably equal to the one in the U.S., judging by the number of baseball hats and sweatshirts with their logos.
These outfits often come from second-hand shops where prices are on par with the budgets of those living on Ukraine’s minimal wage or pensions (Hr 700). These shops would have been a luxury in Soviet times when clothes were in short supply, like much of anything else. The shortage gave a boost to a habit of hoarding, still haunting many Ukrainians to this day.
Two Ukrainian women are entering Khreschatyk metro station in the summer of 2009. The variety of styles, as well as relevance to time and place of certain fashion selections still leaves much to be desired.
The colors of the 1970s were brown and black. Any bright or unusual fabric enlivening the scene would have likely arrived through military families from abroad. It was a time of sew-it-yourself or surrender-to-an-army-of-identical-outfits kind of fashion. To buy a nice-fitting school uniform in the 1980s, for instance, one would look for an acquaintance traveling to Moscow to order one. Undercover fashion dealers with American jeans and shoes from Czechoslovakia thrived.
The first mass delivery of sleek gaudy leggings came in 1990s. It was a revolution. Then came jeans in different colors. Each time a new model arrived, people were sweeping them off the market stalls to have that unique, cool look. As a result, half the town would be dressed in the same model of trousers.
Engulfed by the colors, designs and fabrics these days, it seems that some Ukrainian people try to compensate for the clothing diet they had before. Cocktails of white shirts and black bras, Barbie doll dresses at black tie events, and those pointy-nose men’s shoes with work suits sometimes resemble a circus.
And yet, many Ukrainians take great care of their second skins by carefully ironing jeans and polishing shoes. Foreigners usually extoll Ukrainian women for retaining that feminine look by wearing dresses and heels any day, in any weather. Dress to impress is what a Ukrainian girl first thinks while opening her wardrobe in the morning. The street turns into catwalk for them. It would be nice to see less cleavage in the office, perked up by layers of make-up, but my point of view is clearly not in fashion judging by the number of low-cut shirts on the streets.
Men are far behind, though. I can’t get over the London tube scene where businessmen and bar tenders alike sport pink and white shirts underneath smart jackets. In Kyiv, black and grey apparel has rubbed on their faces as well.
The diversity of styles in the capital is as big as the range of incomes. You can see some people dressing up more luxuriously than in Paris, and some – perhaps more stylishly than in London. But others are dressed worse than they had in the Soviet Union.
Their looks reflect a legacy more weathered and aged than the oldest of LV bags. The tag line for modern Ukraine’s fashion would be “a journey of a thousand lives.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected].
