Saturday, September 11, 2010

засканил статью о Филлиповой

Троицкого из его  книги Tusovka, написанную в течение 88-89гг , когда Артемий Кивович метался от Ялты до Лондона (и многое кстати успевал) и изданная только в 90-м Omnibus Press,когда уже сама тусовка изменилась и частично поредела.Но все по делу,живенько,все  кто должен быть-есть. Вот часть,всю позже выложу на сайт,может и переведем, а пока вот так.

From Stalin to Style in

"These days everybody's putting down and ridiculing socialist realism and all that infamous Soviet pomposity. But is there anything else original enough that we've contributed to the world of art and style since the glorious twenties?"    Walking the streets of Moscow, watching people passing by, you'd be amazed at the number of interesting faces, shapes, and manners of walking. Every minute you stumble into another amusing character with spectacular features . . . pale timid beauties and ugly fat monsters, man-like women with shoulders twice as wide as their thighs and subtle male intellectuals compressed as if somebody had beaten them, vicious looking criminals with low foreheads and gorgeous old men with silver beards. In the West, especially in Europe, the street crowd is less varied: old people probably prefer to stay at home, while the normal working population is close to a unified, nice looking standard, the style of the brave-new-world. The crowds in the Western cities are far more colourful because their clothes are more fun to look at than those who wear them. Soviet streets are utterly boring clothes-wise. There are, in fact, two basic styles of dress: the shop style and the black market style. The first is drab, grey, badly tailored, but not without some weird ugly charm. The second is cheap, quite the worst that Western sales have to offer: jeans, sneakers, plastic jackets and    clothes items, made in Asia   premiere, we find the same two standards, only more expensive: the establishment families proudly wear their dull suits made from best cashmere and fur coats that have hardly changed since the forties, while the cultural celebrities, mafia and foreign relations, parade in last year's fashion-wear from German trade catalogues. In the meantime, their kids, the infamous Golden Youth, are hanging out in downtown bars and discos, showing off their new Levi's, black leather jackets and Adidas sports outfits. Finally, the very cream of the Soviet cool crowd, the hard currency hookers, await their clients in hotel foyers wearing working clothes from Dior, Calvin Klein and Versace. Something very similar, only slightly outdated and made from the worst fabric available, can be seen in the shining showroom windows of the Houses of Fashion - the centres of official haute couture which modestly plagiarise everything from Vogue and Linea Italiana. It was right outside these windows where, in December 1986, I happened to bump into Svetlana Kunitsina, not then my wife, but an MC at the Central House of Fashion. She proposed the establishment of an alternative couture show - right at the sacred church of Soviet clothes design. In theory, it looked like a great idea: nothing really 'alternative' was left in Soviet rock, but 'alternative Soviet fashion' sounded like a challenging enterprise. The only problem was to find something that would fit into this category. Is there any Soviet fashion at all? Or are provincial efforts at copying foreign glamour using cheap materials all we have? Kunitsina, the all-knowing couture expert, confessed that she knew no truly original designers among the professionals. My street-fashion experience was the same: I used to know about half a dozen fremarkably dressed individuals - Garik Gorilla, Bald-headed Irka, Dima the Mammoth and Hank from Chudo-Yudo, Zhanna Aguzarova . . . but all of them | were just style-conscious loonies, not serious designers with a purpose. The only 'avant-garde fashion show' to date has taken place at the Hanoi cinema in Summer 1986 : conceptualists and performance artists ran around dressed in plastic bags, flippers and gas masks, calling it 'The Chernobyl Collection'... again, not too serious. In Tallinn I once went to a hilarious fashion show staged by the students of a local art college: they satirised the Party-dummy style, making the ludicrous seem chic. That was very close to what I had in mind, but geographically remote . . . Anyway, it was absolutely clear that no creative business in this country was as obsolete and pitiful as the fashion business, it wasn't even happening on an underground level. A short but deep investigation nevertheless revealed two wonderful undercover talents, Katia Mikulskaya and Katia Filippova. The two girls were very unlike each other. Mikulskaya was a red-haired and extremely lively punkette, studying at the College of Architecture and obsessed with antique underwear. Later, when I first came to England, I found some similarities between her work and London street fashion, notably her teasing mixture of Victorian orphan sexuality and punk rudeness. She arranged her shows (including that very first one at the velvet catwalk of the House of Fashion) as a sequence of street scenes climaxing in a major fight to the sound of rockabilly music. She and the other Katia were like night and day. Actually, I used to know Ms Filippova: she was supposed to be the costume designer for the staging of Stephen Poliakoff's City Sugar at the Moscow Youth Theatre, and I recorded a soundtrack for the production. We met at the director's home. Filippova was all black leather, bangles and chains; she looked ominous but behaved very shyly. That was probably the reason why someone else was eventually appointed to make the costumes. "I started to get seriously involved in fashion design only recently and, in fact, because of your sudden phone call. I was at home with 'flu, as usual, and you called and invited me to participate in this show... I remember I told you then that I'm not a couturiere at all, that I only make some stuff for myself, simply because I love to get dressed to kill. However, I loved the idea so much that immediately after the call I ran to the mirror, tried some of my rags and began to think of how to arrange them. I made no special items for the show, just got some caps, accessories and put everything together, so it would look like an entity. That is how the first collection was born; there were six designs and I called it Babylon. Babylon - because it was a wild mixture of styles from different ethnic minorities... Well, then I called all my friends who looked more or less model-like (although I don't have many female friends), wound the stuff round them, painted their faces with golden make-up so they'd look like real Mesopotamian mummies - and rushed to the catwalk!" The fashion audience showed no great surprise at the street hooliganism style of Katia Mikulskaya: that was exactly what they thought 'radical chic' was about. Filippova's appearance was unpredictable and totally shocking. Central Russian Heights were performing an uncompromising psychedelic piece called 'Mama, Make Me Some Tea' when these ladies hit the tongue (the Russian name for a catwalk). They looked like a bunch of Nefertitys, dressed in suits that reminded me of Chinese lanterns, ancient Greek togas, uniforms of South American dictators, surrealistic kimonos and something from Star Wars. The models' lips were painted black, their cheeks covered with golden dust. One of them entered the podium walking her balding English bulldog ... They made only one slow round and disappeared behind the curtain. The audience just sat there torpid and speechless, as if a company of aliens from outer space had made a brief visit, and, after a while, there was an explosion of applause. That was the first exposure of Alternative Soviet Fashion and the birth of its first (and probably its only true) star. Katia was impressed with her triumph. She worked hard and in two  months a new collection was ready. It was shown during the Art Days in Riga, in  an old gothic church. The musical backdrop was provided by Alexey Tegin's  Ritual Sonic Sect (who sound like The Swans taken to the extreme, believe it or not) and monumental Laibach soundtracks. All this suited her new collection very well: her Babylonian chaos picked up on the gorgeous imperial element gold, silver and leather. Where she lacked real metal or golden fabrics, she  daringly used foil and glittering stripes from chocolate boxes. It looked just jgrandiose! The costumes were a cross between Tzarist luxury and heavy rock Iviolence with a touch of sadistic sexuality. If Catherine the Great had played in Hvlotley Crew, she'd have been dressed exactly like this. I had never before seen  demonic HM mythology reflected in such a sophisticated and sensual manner in ladies' wear. I nearly started to appreciate the genre . . . "I think these clothes were primarily inspired by my graphic imagery. I'm actually a graphic artist, you know, I even have exhibitions... I was always attracted to the anonymous art, ancient art - starting with murals made by cavemen, and up to Gothic art. Egypt and Mesopotamia are my favourites, followed by Byzantium. So I always had this in my graphic works - empresses, mausoleums, pharaohs ... On the other hand, there's theatre. In a way, I have this very theatrical approach to fashion; I rarely think of how my clothes will look on the streets, or even at the reception - I see them on-stage in the limelight. That's why I became so intrigued by making stage clothes for theatres and rock bands... I personally don't like pop music much, I prefer sixties free jazz-Archie Shepp, Coltrane - but as a spectacle, just visually, it made a big impression on me. That collection I showed in Riga was, actually, an imaginary outfit for some really tough rock group - but unfortunately there's nothing like that around ... It was probably the only collection I've taken seriously enough; later I approached the whole business with a greater degree of irony." An injection of irony was inevitable since shy newcomer Katia has  became one of the darlings of Moscow's ruthless and too-cool-to-be-straight Bohemian community. The first blow to her innocence came from Garik,  nicknamed Gorilla - a guy of uncertain age and frightening face, the biggest expert on Soviet flea markets, whose famous slogan was: 'All possible clothes are already created - one just has to find and mix them up.' (Sounds like the fashion     designer's answer to sampling musicians . . .) So if in some 'in' place in Moscow you spot a person dressed in a baggy Chinese overcoat, riding breeches, Hawaiian shirt, yellow plastic socks and platform shoes - be sure it's either Garik    or one of his pupils. Another person whom Katia couldn't miss was Sergey Kuriokhin, the King of Soviet post-modernist sarcasm. "It began a few years ago, when a drunken Kuriokhin once tried to pick me up in the Saigon cafe in Leningrad, he didn't succeed in sleeping with me, but he invited me to the film shooting of Dialogues the next day. That was terrific; a gorgeous baroque hall full of dirty punks going crazy ... (Dialogues is a documentary, featuring Popular Mechanics and Vladimir Chekasin - see Tusovka. The film was banned for almost a year after Ye. K. Ligachev, then the chief Party ideologist, called it either 'an anarchy' or 'a chaos1 at some conference, and was, in fact, absolutely right.) "After that I didn't see Kuriokhin for a long time, but after the Riga show he managed to find me in Moscow and suggested that I participate in the filming of Rock as both costume designer and featured character. (Rock is another famous documentary, portraying Leningrad's dying underground music scene, as personified by BG, Anton Adasinsky, Victor Tsoy, Yury Shevchuk and Oleg Garkusha. Katia and her girls appear in the movie as a sort of surrealistic intermission.) It seems he was so impressed with my work that afterwards me and my models were invited to every Pop Mechanics performance. I also enjoyed it. I always went with several friends, and this was so jovial, a real live circus, especially the way we were treated on trains, how we got to the gigs with all these huge packs fuU of rags . . .The actual travelling was crazy, even more fun than the concerts." She has also collaborated with Central Russian Heights, the leader of which, Sven Gundlach, attended the same college as her- but he got expelled, of course. Once, when we were making a 'radical Soviet' special for MTV at Katia's former husband's studio, and CRH were performing there in her clothes, Sven gave a perfect description of Filippova's style: "When I put on a costume, made by Katia," he said, "I start to feel like a Stalinist skyscraper in the middle of Moscow." What he actually wore that day was a long, black, pseudo-Caucasian shepherd's felt cloak, decorated with false orders and belted with a wide silk ribbon. His wife Emma, another model, displayed a huge old-fashioned buttoned brassiere, painted with red bricks, like the Kremlin Wall. The item was from Katia's subsequent collection, called 'Red Square'. She began to develop some pretty drastic changes in her attitudes. "After dealing with Garik and Katia Mikulskaya, I began to see my work from another angle, I increased the absurd, grotesque elements in my clothes. I was suddenly driven not to the stylistically immaculate things, but to some sickening paradoxical crossovers, like crinolines with uniforms, punk shades with ethnic Russian hats ... I also started to produce orders - an orthodox Christian cross, for instance, with Lenin's head in the middle. Is that too iconoclastic? Is that blasphemy? Well, why not-1 regard blasphemy as simply a brand new look at the things we're long used to . . ." In Katia's latest collection black and gold colours are replaced by red and khaki. It is, in fact, authentic Soviet military uniform, beautifully trimmed with lace, furs and fake jewels. Just one typical suit: red ballet tutu with an officer's jacket and a giant mitten decorated with metallic stars as a hat. The collection is called 'Major Stogov's Nightmare'. Why? - because almost all the raw materials, including the original uniforms, were bought by Katia from her friends, second-hand shops, babooshkas at street markets, and one of the field jackets she obtained had the ex-owner's name - Major Stogov -written in it. The real thing . . . "The very idea of military uniform is something delirious, a madman's ravings-just imagine a modern man wearing an outfit with plenty of glittering buttons, shoulder-straps, stripes and tabs and so on! It's quite ludicrous; I just took this concept a little over the top, and made it sheer black humour." So, in her own style-conscious way, Katia has joined the sardonic gang of sots-art painters, Pop Mech and AVIA musicians, as well as numerous cooperative manufacturers of nostalgic 'social realism' souvenirs - all those who today break the old Stalinist symbols by ridiculing and parodying them, us a mic vocation, of course ... since people will really laugh at their past fetishes, there's less chance that the old stuff will make a comeback . . . Still, frankly speaking, I was a little disappointed to find Katia in the 'Soviet myth' fighters' camp -firstly, because there's already plenty of them, which looks like jumping on the -bandwagon; secondly, because their artistic methods are rather predictable -just maximum 'absurdisation' of awesome Communist icons; and thirdly, because I have always thought that irony can't really be the crucial point, the essence of art. There are some other important factors and impressions ... As Berthold Brecht once said: "Irony is belief in the middle of the road." So, in my opinion, Katia's earlier, Byzantine designs looked more scary, more 'totalitarian' than her recent 'Designer Stalinism'. Cool mysticism and spooking viewers are simply no longer on Filippova's agenda, and I certainly can't blame her for that. What she does now is social nihilistic chic- and that's hilarious, even if it's not too positive. "As a rule, people who see my clothes, both compatriots and ones from abroad, have a good laugh at them. I like it, I enjoy people having fun with my work, that is the effect I'm happy to achieve. Probably, as some critics say, the political element in my work has taken over the design itself ... But I think that fashion is, and always has been, a reflection of certain social, even ideological trends. So I never try to be intentional with what I do; when it comes to art, and I consider myself an artist, this kind of 'topical' approach always fails. Like, I don't find all those deliberately political rock bands, Televisor or DDT interesting at all. What they do is too concrete, too obvious and doesn't last for long. If my work smells of politics - then it's politics of imagination, not slogans. For this reason I don't feel too flattered when they call my designs 'anti-Soviet', I prefer descriptions like 'hooligan', 'blasphemous' or 'paranoid'.   'Anti-Soviet fashion'? That sounds so weird! Especially now, when the infamous label of anti-Sovietism is so rarely used' even to condemn the political bad guys and various imperialist enemies... Glasnost and pluralism have now made this word a rare and prestigious compliment, and Katia has thus been honoured several times. It refers to the sad fact that the institution of Soviet fashion design is deadly conservative, ruled by laws of industry not art, and the aesthetic taboos, long denied elsewhere, still exist in the ideologically correct world of clothes. Not surprisingly, Katia Filippova and her comrades have absolutely no official support whatsoever. I have never seen a bunch of people so alone, vulnerable and unwanted as our alternative designers' community. "I'm afraid of the so-called common people, we feel so distant from them. We are a small party, we all know each other, we all hang out with each other. The majority would consider what we are doing to be madness. We are like white crows, or black sheep. Sometimes when 1 put on one of my most discreet dresses to go to a concert or a party, and I walk the street, 1 hear people saying dirty things about me, looking at me as if 1 was a giant AIDS virus... I once had a street shoot on the bridge near Red Square, right where Mathias Rust landed, and there was a fat lady passing by; she wasn't rude, unlike others, she just stopped, observed us, as if she didn't believe her eyes, and finally pronounced: "What a hideous caricature!"ью

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