Leader of the Gang: Gosha Rubchinskiy and the Death of the Catwalk

Abstract

Of all the fashion designers to have emerged in Russia in recent years, few are more remarkable than Gosha Rubchinskiy. He first made his name as a fashion photographer and designer of street wear, before being signed up by Adrian Joffe at Comme des Garçons in 2012. One of the most interesting aspects of Rubchinskiy’s work is his video output. Rubchinskiy’s unique brand of moving image completely “transfigures” the fashion film, raising important questions about the role and status of the fashion designer, the limits of the fashion film, the workings of the fashion system, the role of the catwalk, and indeed the nature of fashion itself. These questions are the focus of this article, which discusses three of Rubchinskiy’s films in particular, namely Transfiguration, The Casting of Alexey and The Day of My Death.

Keywords:

• criticality
• fashion film
• Gosha Rubchinskiy
• postmodern brands
• Russia

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Graham H. Roberts

Graham H. Roberts teaches at Nanterre University, near Paris. The author of a D.Phil. on the Soviet avant-garde literary group known as “OBERIU,” he has recently published a monograph entitled Consumer Culture, Branding and Identity in the New Russia: From Five-Year Plan to 4x4 (Routledge, 2016), and edited a volume on material culture in Russia and the USSR (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

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