My Name is Red

The recently concluded Moscow Fashion Week got it all. The pretty press, the performed patriotism and the positively political. But there was more

- Chinki Sinha

“She was carrying these revolting, disturbing yellow flowers. God knows what they’re called, but for some reason they’re the first to appear in Moscow. And these flowers stood out very distinctly from her black spring coat. She was carrying yellow flowers!”

—Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

IN her hands, the woman was carrying a bunch of pink tulips. Not yellow. These were for a friend who was showing at the fourth edition of the Moscow Fashion Week in March. Yellow flowers in Russia symbolise sadness and betrayal. It could mean dissent. One must be very, very careful here. She had worked in London before but had returned to the motherland a few years ago.

“Yes, there is a war out there. We shouldn’t speak about the war here,” the woman in the black spring coat said while smoking her cigarette outside the Manege Central Exhibition Hall near the Kremlin in Moscow. It was already evening. She disappeared in the crowd later. Bulgakov’s classic is about the devil’s arrival in Moscow in springtime. As with other Russian masters like Dostoevsky, Bulgakov was both loved and feared by the powers that be. This spring, a model sported white-blind contact lenses on the runway, a faux devil incarnate. This is how fashion arrived in springtime in Moscow.

There were a lot of flowers in Moscow this spring despite sanctions against the country by the European Union in 2022 that prohibited EU member states from exporting flower bulbs and nursery stock products to Russia. Everywhere, people were carrying flowers. On the runway, designers were greeted with bouquets. Sanctions or no sanctions, the Moscow Fashion Week extravaganza was enough communication to suggest all is well in Russia.

The Moscow Fashion Week, held from March 13 to 17, was a placeholder of such cultural diplomacy and Russia’s relationship with friendly countries like China and India.

It was a “politically correct” runway.