2023-05-01 03:44:07
Moscow fashionistas are in mourning. The famous Russian fashion designer Vyacheslav (Slava) Zaïtsev, nicknamed by the Western press the “Red Dior” and the “Czar of Soviet fashion”, died Sunday at 85, after a long illness. “Yes”, he died, spokeswoman for his Moscow fashion house, Kira Bourenina, told AFP, confirming information from Russian media.
At the beginning of March, when he “gathered his friends for his birthday, we could already see that he was very, very weak,” she said. According to his colleagues at the Russian Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was a member, the fashion designer who became known as Slava (short for his first name Vyacheslav), died after a long illness.
“Fashion designer Viatcheslav Zaïtsev has died. This year, he celebrated his 85th birthday”, lamented the Russian public channel Pervy Kanal, paying tribute to this man “who dictated Soviet and Russian fashion for decades, an innovator who was not afraid to audacious experiments. “It’s a great loss for the world of global fashion,” said Russian designer Sergei Zverev, quoted by the public agency Ria Novosti, lamenting the departure of a “legend”.
The couturier, who created more than a thousand models during his career, had made himself known in the world with his dresses using the flamboyant patterns of the traditional shawls of his country.
“I can dress a whole parade in Red Square”
“I can dress a whole parade on Red Square with my clothes…”, said Slava Zaïtsev in 2017 in an interview with AFP. In 1963, the French weekly Paris Match compared him to a Soviet Christian Dior. In 1988, Vogue magazine dubbed him the “Soviet fashion czar.” Born on March 2, 1938 in Ivanovo, a city of 400,000 inhabitants northeast of Moscow, Zaïtsev grew up in a modest family, his mother being a housekeeper.
He first studied in a technical high school specializing in chemistry and then entered the Moscow Textile Institute, which trains fabric factory technicians. The most prestigious universities in the capital were closed to him because his father, captured by the Germans during the Second World War, was considered at the end of the conflict as a traitor by the Stalinist regime and sentenced to ten years in a camp.
“When I was a child, my mother taught me to embroider so I wouldn’t wander aimlessly down the street. In the evening, with girlfriends, we picked flowers on Lenin Avenue to draw them and reproduce these drawings in embroidery. That’s how I got introduced to art, ”the designer told AFP in 2017.
Fashion too colorful for the Soviet authorities
In 1962, her first collection of working clothes for working women – skirts inspired by the flower patterns of traditional Russian shawls and multicolored felt boots – was banned by the Soviet authorities. Because of the “too bright” colors which contrasted with “the grayness of Soviet daily life, where no one should distinguish themselves from the others”, according to Slava Zaïtsev.
The collection, however, attracted the interest of Western media. In 1963, Paris Match became the first magazine in the West to feature Zaitsev as a Soviet fashion pioneer. Monitored by the KGB because of his contacts with Western fashion designers and his character as a free spirit, Zaïtsev was not allowed to leave the country and his first collections traveled abroad without him.
Between 2007 and 2009, Slava Zaitsev hosted a popular TV show, “The Verdict of Fashion”, where stylists dressed in the latest housewives’ fashions. True happiness is “working every day with people”, by creating models for customers and not for the catwalks, assured the designer to AFP in 2017.
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