In light of designer Gosha Rubchinskiy's SS '17 collection we wanted to highlight an excerpt from the recent New York Times article "When it Became Cool to Be Cool". Mr. Rubchinsky's popularity has skyrocketed over the past couple years, his brand has grown from local recognition to a universal audience, and now with his latest world wide release Rubchinsky continues to use his Russian influence on designs that are more popular than ever.
"...Mr. Rubchinskiy brought his skater crew — friends, and friends of friends, and Ms. Volkova, who collaborates with him as well as with Mr. Gvasalia — to Florence, where he jettisoned the usual palazzo for a decommissioned tobacco factory. His business has been growing by leaps and bounds since he brought it out of Moscow and onto the Paris Fashion Week calendar, but the Pitti show expanded it further than ever before.
“After Pitti, many people who never knew about Gosha started to know about it,” Mr. Rubchinskiy said in an interview this month. “It’s interesting: It got more established. Or, more people from the establishment know about it.”
Mr. Rubchinskiy has taken steps to ensure that the brand remains tied to his personal experience. He still lives in Moscow, where he has recently opened a larger design studio. His business is managed by the Japanese fashion label Comme des Garçons, which also produces the collections, but under its umbrella he has free rein to design as he pleases, to stock his shows with his friends and to shoot his own images, which are compiled in his own collectible books.
“I still feel it’s very necessary for my brand to stay personal, and for me it’s only interesting if it’s still personal,” Mr. Rubchinskiy said. His next show, after Pitti, will be in far-flung Kaliningrad, a Russian city (technically an exclave) wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. Future shows will be in Russia as well.
“I tried to do everything by myself — all the styling, all art direction for the show: It’s Gosha total control,” Mr. Rubchinskiy said with a laugh. “We try to do this time the same as it was eight years ago, for the first show. I made it myself, outside of any fashion weeks, in Moscow.”
Yet despite its ultraspecific purview — try to think of another fashion brand stocked on shelves in London, Los Angeles, New York and Paris with a logo in Cyrillic — Gosha Rubchinskiy is resonating with a global audience. Its business is up 350 percent this year, according to Comme des Garçons, and larger brands, including Reebok and Vans, line up to work with him. Collaborations with Fila, Kappa and Levi’s will arrive with his spring collection.
“They sell out within the blink of an eye, basically,” said Federico Barassi, the men’s wear buying director of Ssense, a forward-leaning e-commerce site with a global clientele (and a Montreal brick-and-mortar shop for good measure). “The collaborations, once they appear on the website it’s couple of hours, if not minutes.”
In fact, Ssense, which caters to a younger audience than many traditional luxury stores — its clientele is 77 percent millennial, according to Mr. Barassi and Brigitte Chartrand, the women’s wear buying director — does a brisk business in all three of these designers. Vetements, Mr. Barassi said, is a “unicorn brand; it’s been out of this world.” In the past few weeks, Gucci was added to the mix; in 2017, global distribution for Balenciaga will come, too."
Read the full article here and check out the lookbook preview from the SS '17 collection. Stay tuned for more information regarding the drop.
