BRIC POP: The Blog

This is just dumb stereotyping of the worst kind.  Catrina Stewart, reporting from the AP, on Michelle Obama’s visit to Moscow:

MOSCOW (AP) — Michelle Obama brings her superstar glamour to Moscow this weekend as she accompanies her husband on his summit with the Russian president.

It goes on:

Russian President Dmitry Medvedev’s wife Svetlana is pious and discreet and met her husband while she was a schoolgirl. She supports charity and the arts, but has assumed no independent voice on issues facing the country. She dresses conservatively, lacking the edgy fashion sense that has attracted a nationwide following for Michelle Obama.

Stewart even manages to get a quote out of superstar Vogue Russia editor Aloyna Doletskaya, but with her own little topspin on it:

Vogue’s Doletskaya is cagey about passing judgment on Svetlana’s style, saying simply that she is “very representative of Russian femininity.”

But when questioned about the U.S. first lady, Doletskaya becomes lively. She describes Michelle’s style as “very fresh,” as someone who mixes boldly “but in a very refined way.”

So essentially, Ms Stewart (who has filed many a story for the Moscow Times and should know better) perpetuates the woefully outdated Wendy’s “Russian Fashion Show” TV commercial done by Cliff Freeman in the 80s:

What nonsense.  Russian women leave American women in the dust for glamour.  Totally.  Michelle Obama might make some interesting fashion choices, particularly with low-cost brands, but the idea that she’s somehow bringing glamour to a glamourless Moscow is the most unintentionally hilarious thing I’ve read in my three years of traveling the BRICs.

Svetlana Medvedeva is no slouch in the sartorial elegance department, and the idea that any Russian woman would take their cues from an American one is just silly.  Let’s have a look at the ‘frumpy shrinking violet’ who is Russia’s First Lady:

(AP Photo/RIA-Novosti, Vladimir Rodionov, Presidential Press Service)

(Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)

That last photo is important because it caused a bit of a stir in Moscow media circles.  The First Lady is wearing a $30,000 Breguet watch.  That’s Breguet, not Target.

This is actually one of my favorite BRIC Pop subjects:  Russian glamur or гламур.  Because it’s the exact opposite of how it’s presented in the West, and what you first might conclude through first impressions of people you see in the hotels and velvet rope clubs in Moscow.  True Russian style isn’t drab, vulgar, borrowed, or conservative, or any of the other pejoratives we’ve mistakenly applied.  In fact, гламур is rich and fabulous in the non-superficial aspects of both words, and miles ahead of anything we American rubes can conjure up.

A few years back, I read a report in the Moscow News that the publishing industry has selected a “Word of the Year” for 2007: “glamour.”  Not really a surprise.  Apparently, the elitny, perhaps finding Gogol not approving enough of new wealth, wanted to hear more about why it’s good to be rich.  I imagined a section of the bookstore that would fit quite nicely between Extravagance and Hubris.  But who would actually walk in and ask, “Can you please tell me where I can find Glamour?”  That’s just too easy for the caustic wit of a Russian bookseller.

It’s easy to look at New Russian wealth as a kind of tacky glamour, but there was a deeper, more real glamur/гламур under the surface that the Russians just don’t feel like sharing with you.  For about 10 years now, one line of Russia luxury has been channeling an extreme and vulgar application of branded Western trinkets. And do they ever have fun with it!  That may be Russia-meets-glamour, but the second line of real glamur is something completely different.

Svetlana Medvedeva has glamur.  The Bolshoi and Mariinsky ballets, figure skating coaches in fur coats (spend a winter in Murmansk, PETA), and the Ararat Park Hyatt have glamur.  Natalia Vodianova and the new Ritz are merely glamour, if that.

A vintage Soviet dacha to the west of Moscow or a refurbed sanitarium up in the mountains from Sochi is glamur.  An identikit Tudor mansion with concrete Greek columns is glamour.  A Lamborghini is glamour; a bulletproof Audi A8 is glamur.

A little place to hang out in Sochi

There’s always been taste in Russia, and there’s always been vulgarity.  A temporary shift in wealth only changed the visibility of the latter.  Even Ksenia Sobchak and Sergei Zverev (I’ve interviewed him and he’s quite nice and very intelligent) know when they’re pushing glamour versus glamur.  So if one wants to talk about glamour in Russia: 1) don’t start with anything American – ugh, and 2) change the spelling and alphabet and try to look into the ever-changing concept of what constitutes luxury for people who already have everything they want, and what this next iteration of home-grown Russia luxury can offer to the West.

In the meantime, Svetlana Medvedeva holds her own quite nicely on an international stage, don’t you think?