After a really long pause, a smile and a remark that that must be the most unexpected question of the day, her answer is… raw potato.

— A potato is such a universal product. You can make it into, say, potatoes with herring, just put it there. Or you can turn it into an exquisite dish and serve it accordingly. It’s something with this universal form, and depending on the context, it can become completely different things.

In other words, the material is not destiny.

Which, it turns out, is quite a good way into Helena Tadesse.

— Are you wearing anything today that has that kind of story behind it? I ask immediately.

— I am. Let me stand up… I’m wearing trousers today. They’re an upcycled pair of Adidas track pants, with a tailored section from another pair added at the back.

Helena pulls up her shirt and turns to show, almost twirls.

The trousers are a sample from her 2022 drop, from when she was working with the textile manufacturer Shuysky Chintz. In them, she combined traditional Ivanovo chintz — lightweight cotton known for its chirpy floral prints — with sportswear.

— I really liked bringing something sporty — more masculine, contemporary — together with something feminine and provincial. And I think that also has to do with my own background: this exploration of the provincial, the attempt to bring that into contact with high fashion.

She grew up in Ivanovo. There wasn’t much money for materials when she made her first pieces as a student. Upcycling was incredibly accessible — and almost inexhaustible.

She was drawn to it for another reason too.

— Somehow, it makes beginning easier. You’re not confronted with a blank page. There is already an object in front of you, which means there is already a subject. The moment you pick it up, a kind of dialogue begins.

In Russian media, two words follow Helena’s work around: upcycling and deconstruction. But I wonder if she fully recognises herself in them, and if there is anything she feels they leave out.

True, upcycling was how she started, but it can feel too narrow now. Back then, upcycling came wrapped in this powerful environmental promise: that somehow, by reusing what already existed, fashion designers might help save the world from pollution. Only Helena has never really framed her own work that way.

“But surely that’s what your work is about?” people would sometimes say. She remembers being invited to the Swiss Embassy in Moscow for a day devoted to environmental issues. She took part with one of her drops.

— I got to meet the Swiss ambassador to Russia, and also got to see how incredibly elegant the embassy was inside. But you know, I started noticing that so much of this remains just talk. An event takes place, a box gets ticked: there, we’ve addressed the issue. But in practical terms, it rarely develops into anything beyond that.

— I might release a collection of, say, a few dozen pieces, but it would be ridiculous to claim that I’m somehow affecting the environmental situation in the world.

— I’m much more interested in upcycling as an artistic method.

In deconstruction, she recognises herself. Still. Fully. It was never simply about taking something apart and putting it back together.

— I’m not interested in just remaking a garment. What interests me is deconstructing its original function and allowing it to move into another one.

She brings up Marcel Duchamp’s urinal: an object removed from its original function and placed in another context, becoming an art object. Helena started out in drawing and painting; her training is in traditional art. Deconstruction was already there in her early work, she explains. And the approach has moved — seamlessly! — into clothing and even digital archives.

— It’s a particular pattern in the way I see things.

So what makes something worth a second look? What can become a Helena Tadesse piece? This one, yes. This one, no. Choosing has become almost instinctive, she says.

Blazers. Her unofficial major in garment construction. Without formal training in pattern making, she looked for pieces whose construction already had something up its sleeve — what do we have here, a pun? A silhouette, a cut, the trace of a particular period. Taking them apart and putting them back together — this was essentially how she taught herself as a student.

— When you take a garment apart and then reconstruct it, you inevitably begin to understand the entire process and the sequence behind it.

But not everything interesting belongs in a Helena Tadesse piece. What she picks has to sync with the visual language of the brand: a particular palette, architectural cuts and, above all, contrast. Give her a soft floral Ivanovo chintz and she wants to give it structure. Give her something highly constructed and she will find a way to disrupt it.

— I’m always working with contrast, both conceptually and technically.

Ah, men’s tailoring is her delight.

— I love men’s clothes in general. Shirts perhaps a little less, but trousers and suit jackets, absolutely.

She is drawn to their weight, their construction, the evidence of a time when the technology behind clothing was still geared towards making something that would last. To live, she says.

— When you take a garment like that apart, you think: damn, this is solid. All those Soviet jackets of ours, made at some Factory No. 9, some garment combine.

And before Helena takes any of it apart, she does something very simple: she puts it on.

— It’s crucial for me to try it on first. To see how it already sits on the body, untouched, how the cut works, what the garment already does to the body.

— Helena, I have a somewhat peculiar question, I say by way of warning, then continue. I grew up in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when we had these consignment shops, and for some reason I’ve carried this feeling since childhood that a consignment shop is a place where some kind of bad energy lives.

Because you think: why did someone give this thing away? You don’t give away something you love, do you? Maybe they needed money — my mother consigned a few of her to-die-for leather jackets together with her wedding band because we did. Maybe something happened. And the thing belonged to someone; that person had a life — maybe a good one, maybe not.

— It took me quite a while to undo that deep feeling that clothes somehow absorb this energy. And I’m still not sure I’m there yet. Do you ever have that? I finally ask.

— That’s actually a really interesting subject. We have entire generations who grew up with shortages, and for them all of this is tied to memories that aren’t particularly good. They want everything new.

Helena understands the squeamishness too, the fear of wearing something another person has lived in, even the old suspicion that it might be a dead man’s suit, she says and smiles. And second-hand shops themselves don’t always help: the stale smell, that faint sense of something unhygienic.

She has her own boundaries as a designer.

— For me, it would be an outer layer: a coat, a trench, a jacket. Not something that sits directly against the body.

Deconstruction, after all, means getting unusually intimate with somebody else’s old clothes.

— I remove the lining, unpick all sorts of elements. And I’ll tell you: it’s very dirty work. Once you start unpicking these things, inside there’s just centuries of dust.

And sometimes, little remains of a life: old money, receipts, travel passes, bus tickets crumbling into dust in the pockets. She lifts her palm and spreads her fingers, as if something invisible were running through them.

And sometimes it is precisely that previous life that makes a garment impossible to throw away. Once, a woman brought her grandmother’s wedding dress. It had been made to order and sewn by hand, but was now so old-fashioned that there seemed little she could do with it. And discarding it wasn’t an option.

— The cut was interesting and the shape itself. Vintage through and through, the real thing.

So yes, people bring her things like that, Helena says. Passed almost directly from one person’s life into her hands.

And when you work with things like this, what do they allow you to understand about yourself?

— That I’m a researcher. An object like this gives me a new problem to solve every time. It becomes a propeller for action: you start reading about what this thing actually is, where it came from. How did people wear it? What did it mean? How does that connect with what’s happening in fashion now? What could I make out of it?

— You see the chain of brain activity it takes to come up with something new?

Where does a Helena Tadesse piece begin?

— With my multicultural identity. I think that’s where it begins.

Take one of her blazers.

— A man’s blazer is, in a way, a contemporary version of knight’s armour. It signals status, masculinity.

And then Helena puts holes in it.

The perforations in her blazers usually go straight through — no mesh, nothing between the opening and the body. She takes something built to shield and exposes its vulnerable part. It can also be highly sexualised: she thinks of Mugler’s architectural jackets and their triangular silhouettes on women.

— For me, all of this is about opening up that second skin — in that particular way. The material comes after.

When you think about the way you see clothing today, how much of it comes from where and how you grew up?

— A lot. My grandmother raised me. My mother brought me to her from Moscow to Ivanovo when I was three months old and left me there.

Helena’s father is Ethiopian, her mother Russian. Her surname is Tadesse, her name Helena. And she grew up in Pustyshbor, a provincial district of an already provincial city, as she describes it: private houses interspersed with five-storey Brezhnev-era apartment blocks. She lived in one of those blocks, a brezhnevka.

Dark-skinned, difficult for the people around her to place, and drawn to things that didn’t particularly align her with her peers.

— A lot of the bullying was specifically connected to my background.

Other ethnic minorities had communities around them, she remembers. Armenian children, for instance, had siblings and relatives throughout the school, an informal protection Helena didn’t have.

— I was completely on my own in that sense. There was no diaspora around me at all.

At one point the bullying became so bad that her grandmother — Helena calls her grandmother Ba, short for babushka — enlisted several older Armenian girls at the school to take Helena under their wing.

— For a while I was safe.

At home, meanwhile, her origins were largely taboo. Ba knew very little herself — she had never met Helena’s father — and didn’t particularly like talking about it.

— So I grew up in that kind of environment: bullying at school; the subject of my origins — taboo at home.

Something shifted when Helena left school after ninth grade and entered art college. Leaving school early came with its own stigma, she says. Vocational education could make you seem like “a second-class person.” But there she found something she hadn’t had before.

— The people at the art college were much more erudite. There were normal people there.

She studied history of art and of architecture. And in that new environment, with a more stable sense of her own worth, she began turning towards the very thing she had learnt not to look at.

— I began to understand that this could actually be interesting. That it could be beautiful, that there was something unique about it. Because when you’re constantly being put down, and then within your own family there is this discomfort around talking about it too — that’s a very strange thing.

By her early twenties, as she continued her studies, Helena had begun exploring her African heritage: patterns, prints, textile design, painting on silk. Strangely, though, her first collaboration — her graduation project — had nothing to do with Africa at all.

Ivanovo is the textile capital of Russia. The City of Brides.

— My university organised trips to factories around the Ivanovo region, and we visited one of the oldest, Shuysky Chintz. It’s two hundred years old.

The factory had archives stretching back to pre-revolutionary designs.

— The archives were just divine.

But only a handful of those old patterns — the work of generations of factory artists — were still in production, mostly as bed linen.

The archival photographs caught her attention too. Then and now: women in chintz housecoats, in aprons, each one different. A motley of florals. The light chintz does have its logic inside the factory, where it is incredibly stuffy and hot.

— You look at how people looked in the past, and then at what you see in front of you, and nothing changed.

Behind the City of Brides nickname is a tragic history, Helena explains. Women were left working in the major factories when the men didn’t come back from World War II. Most of the men didn’t come back.

— And I think that affected the psychology of these women very deeply, shaping a particular mentality. Because where we’re from, you know, the women are, on the one hand, very dressed up. You walk through the city and all the women really want to be attractive, they dress that way, it’s very important to them. They love floral prints.

At the same time, the women Helena encountered at the factory seemed to embody something else entirely.

— Women of incredible toughness and strength. They don’t need to please anyone at all. They’ll do everything themselves.

— I found that contradiction really interesting. It felt like something that needed to be explored.

Helena made a capsule collection: dresses, trousers, shirts, all made from the fabrics Shuysky Chintz was producing at the time. That tension — femininity and toughness, floral chintz and industrial labour — ran through it. There was this theme of sisterhood too: women supporting one another, the factory itself as an overwhelmingly female world.

It became her first project to really make some noise, she says. Submitted to an international graduate competition partnered with Gucci, it was shortlisted. And from that project, her brand began.

And where does your own history show up in the clothes?

— The clothes I make must create a feeling of confidence in the person wearing them. Because architectural construction is about creating this kind of inner spine. Something stable.

It’s also about accepting your own vulnerability, in some way, and a certain sentimentality. Because the presence of Ivanovo chintz is a very sentimental story. It’s a provincial story.

— For many in the fashion industry here, the provinces, provinciality, that’s something almost on the verge of cringe.

— So for me, it’s about accepting your identity, whatever that identity happens to be.

But what actually is provinciality? I honestly don’t quite understand.

— Everyone has their own provinces.

Something peripheral, she says, outside the metropolitan centre and its ideas of good taste. In Russian, “provincial” is not a neutral geographical description. It often comes with the judgement of the centre: unfashionable and behind the times. Then she arrives at a definition she likes better.

— A little wild, in a good way. That’s how I’d put it. The provinces are a little wild. And that’s where their freedom is, their self-expression.

There is a peculiar contradiction in Moscow fashion circles, she says. The “dirty” aesthetic is in — poor neighbourhoods, roughness, decay, the deliberately unpolished — but the references tend to come from elsewhere, particularly America. Our own provinciality still tiptoes on the verge of cringe, she adds.

Upcycling can be many things: grungy, with the raw edges and all, so you can immediately see this has been remade. And that may be the point. But that’s not Helena’s upcycling.

— I take it to the point where it becomes luxury clothing. I like taking it that far.

— I want to see the potential in something dirty, forgotten, defective, and how it could become a couture dress on the red carpet.

How did it all sprout? As a child, Helena was a member of a fashion theatre. That’s how. And there really was such a thing. (Still is.)

— Yes. I think it’s actually an invention of Russia and the former Soviet countries. It’s a whole cultural phenomenon. A very local, small-town kind of story.

There were children’s fashion theatres like this in cities across the country, usually housed at the local Palace of Children’s Creativity — there is such a thing, too. Helena says hers had a huge influence on who she became. She was in fourth grade when her grandmother enrolled her in the one in Ivanovo. She already loved drawing. She marvels that at that age she could draw the proportions of a deer perfectly.

— That’s where I got some of my first sewing skills. That’s where I made my first clothes. Where I learned. I didn’t like sewing that much, though. I preferred drawing.

There were classes in sewing and fashion illustration, and another side devoted to staging and presenting the collections.

— So essentially, a whole production. From creating all the way to presenting.

An organising force behind this phenomenon was Slava Zaitsev, the Ivanovo-born couturier whom the Western press called the “Red Dior.” He started the Golden Needle competition, which Helena won more than once.

And once again, Ivanovo was central. The children studied Russian costume, particularly the costume of their own region, and worked with inexpensive fabrics from local textile mills: linen, cotton, floral prints, even bed linen.

— So basically, there already was research. We studied Russian costume, we studied fabrics from local manufacturers.

Do you have elements of Russian costume in your drops?

— No, I don’t specifically use the construction. Like that traditional shirt with an off-centre collar, for example. I don’t work that way.

— With my clothes, there’s this line not to overdo it. Because I already use elements of local culture: the patterns, Ivanovo chintz. That’s the only element I use, because it’s already very bright, very emphatic. If I started adding more, it would become that same fashion theatre I studied in.

We both laugh.

What makes Ivanovo chintz special? Two things together: it was visually rich, while the material itself was very cheap.

— It wasn’t silk, it wasn’t some sophisticated weave.

It was chintz, beauty without preciousness.

Helena makes a U-turn.

— Actually, my construction and silhouette were also shaped quite significantly by European designers.

— And here we have that same contrast. I’m from an environment where we studied traditional Russian costume, while at the same time, as a teenager, I was watching Alexander McQueen shows.

With that particular pattern in the way she sees things, Helena can upturn anything, it seems. This summer, during a fashion residency in Nizhny Novgorod, she set out to research the city’s aviation history through the lives of Pyotr Nesterov and Valery Chkalov — not as heroes, as human beings — alongside the history of functional clothing (remember the chintz housecoats?). The resulting installation began with a parachute whose canopy became an enormous dress whose volume spread from the body like wings.

When you let a piece go, once you’ve finished working on it, do you ever feel that something leaves you along with it?

Helena thinks for a long moment.

— Leaves me… No, I don’t think it leaves me. It scales up, you know?

— It’s as though your vision, your way of seeing, expands out into space and finds a life of its own inside other people’s lives.

This, she says, is essentially why she loves working with actors and artists. Sometimes she does it for free, she admits, “which is kind of not great.”

— But in doing that, it’s as though I expand my own impressions, my background, my experience, whatever it is I want to communicate. When I dress a particular person, they become, in a way, a continuation of that transmission.

Actor Mark Eydelshteyn was one of those people.

— We did an editorial shoot with him for a magazine. Mark, as an actor, was always perceived as a little prince — a very youthful, delicate boy. We wanted to reveal a different side of him: something more masculine, even rugged.

It turned out he had trained in boxing. One of the locations was a boxing ring at a martial arts school in Nizhny Novgorod, where Mark is from. Helena made a kimono for the shoot.

— To suit the setting and to highlight that side of him. I fused traditional printed cotton fabrics from Ivanovo with sportswear.

And suddenly we are back where we began: Ivanovo chintz and sportswear. Those Adidas trousers she’s wearing.

— What potato dish would be exquisite to you? I ask her.

— Some kind of potatoes with chanterelles, she says. Baked, not mashed.

As always, thank you for being here in this space with me and PEAR NOT BEAR heroes. Spasibo!

Subscribe now

July 2.

How can it be that the air is sweet? What makes my brain fire sweet if there is nothing literally sweet around? Cars go by, bicycles. But the air is sweet and soft and I take a breath and I don’t want to let go of it — I’ll just stand here, inflated like a balloon, a memory holder.

It’s my birthday.

Summer is like nail polish remover. No layers. Your body and something light — a lightness — to slip, step into. Something light gets soaked in the morning rain. The air is still sweet.

Let’s pick a bottle of champagne. I’m stuck between two. Do I want to go green apple and chalk or should it be something richer, more ancient? I’ll take a coffee first to make up my mind. “Are these seashells?” I ask about the sticker on one of the bottles. They are, yes. From the soil at the vineyard. The region of Champagne used to be a seabed. I’m sold. The green apple and chalk turned out to be a million marigold exclamation marks. I only wished there was ocean sand at the bottom of my glass. Or in my hair.

In Sochi for a few weeks last year, I stood on the coast at night and out of nowhere asked the Black Sea what it feels like to never end. It wasn’t an ordinary question, that I knew. I felt it leave me with a long exhale. The next day I found a sea shell at my feet. It felt like a gift. It was one. And it wasn’t an ordinary hollow shell, it was a band. I put it on my pinky. And I felt engaged.

Also in Sochi, I joined a tour up in the mountains. A first for me. We went to Rosa Khutor and Krasnaya Polyana. In the van the guide asked us, jokingly, what was better than the mountains? I didn’t know you were supposed to say only mountains! And I shouted: the sea! I was the only one.

I think sea and soul should be synonyms. Both rustle.

I slip on the band when I need to be reminded of something. What that something is I may not even know, I usually don’t. But my soul is always happy, my back straightens. Funny, my soul, my body, my thoughts… a list of belongings.

Let’s catch an afternoon movie. “In London in 2002, supermodel Kate Moss agrees to pose for a painting by aging artist Lucian Freud.” Moss & Freud, released in the Netherlands today. “When one is naked, there is no hiding. Only truth.”

I don’t know. This idea of truth being accessible only in nudity rubs me the wrong way. Why is truth often confused with rawness? A movie about art and fashion, and I wish it had more art and more fashion.

I really enjoyed the portrayal of Bella Freud though. I didn’t know she had this languid way of speaking. I know she has a podcast. I go home and finally listen to an episode. Her voice rustles.

— Welcome to Fashion Neurosis, Anna Sokha. Can you tell me what you are wearing and why you chose these particular clothes?

— I’m wearing a Derek Lam skirt. I got it during the pandemic. I was going through the divorce at the time, and this skirt looked like sunshine. Obviously I needed to have it then, especially since it was on sale. It's A-line and ribbed and falls below the knee. The ribs are powdery pink; the skirt itself is marigold. I have it on now because I feel joyful. And it sways. It almost seems to make a move before I do. Beautiful skirt. I’m also wearing a Cedric Charlier top… The sleeves are an intense tomato red, the body is turquoise, the collar and cuffs are dipped in deep charcoal. Sounds wild, but it works! Together with the skirt, it’s a birthday rendered in colour. I think. I first saw this top in Paris, but the store didn’t have it in my size, so I got it online when I returned home from my trip with my girlfriends. It was my first designer piece.

A year ago I would have answered the question very differently. I preferred a soft T-shirt and worn-in jeans to anything else. There was a sort of quieting in my mind, and the colours I loved felt like too much. No—I think, for the first time in my life, I felt like I was enough as I was. And unconsciously, I’d started reaching for simpler clothes. Did I arrive at more truth about myself by removing the layers? I don't think I did. I think I arrived at a better understanding of why I wanted them. Someone’d asked me over coffee if I was enjoying the silent city, it being the holiday season and all. And I realised yes, that was exactly it, I just didn’t have the right words for it.

A beer bottle shard on the sidewalk and it looks like green sea glass. The sea seems to appear everywhere.

— And how about your jewellery? I noticed you have these really nice rings.

— Thank you. For some reason I wear all my rings on my left hand. I only realised that just now. Interesting. On my index finger, I have stacked two. One is a simple gold band my grandmother gave me a year ago. The other is made of silver, slightly wider, and has a hand-carved feel to it. A friend once described it as goth, but that’s just oxidation. It was my mother’s until I made it mine. I’ve worn it for ages. Now it keeps my grandmother’s ring from sliding, and I like the gold and silver pairing. On my pinky is the sea ring.

— You didn’t grow up on the coast, yet the way you speak of the sea makes me think you did. Why is the sea so important to you?

— It’s not the sea in the broad sense. It’s the Black Sea. When I was very little, we’d spend a week or so on the Black Sea every summer. Back then, everyone went there. My childhood sea. The pebbles caught in a breaking wave sound like the hard candies I used to stuff into my cheeks as a child until I couldn’t speak and only crackled.

Skin. Salt. Seagrass. A beach towel, hot-hot from the sun, a hair comb next to it. And a distant whiff of freshly boiled corn on the cob. Back then, it would be an older woman with a loud voice walking up and down the rocky beach with a bucket full of piping-hot corn from the depths of her crooked kitchen, shouting hot corn, hot corn! Hot corn with salt. On the beach. Nothing better.

The sea had secrets. I loved that. Where are all the dolphins? Why did I find all this sea glass yesterday and none today? Who left this driftwood here? It's exactly the shape of a telephone receiver.

And what happened on the other side of the horizon? On the mountain tour, the guide said this was once the sea you crossed to leave the known world.

Then, one summer, when I was 13 or 14, I developed a crush on a young man because he looked at me once, smiled, and asked how I was doing. We were sitting at a long communal dinner table at a beach cafe. The next afternoon I would be taking the train back home, the holiday was over, and all I knew about him was his name and that he had the softest brown eyes. Ah, that moment when you realise you are attracted to someone and it’s going to have to end right there is like coming down with the flu. Only it didn’t end right there. I was lovestruck for the next year, and chewed my mother’s ears off talking about him.

I remember the sky being overcast. Why do moments like these always seem to happen under an overcast sky? Funny, but not.

And those seashells. I don't remember who told me you could hear the ocean if you held a seashell to your ear. Maybe it was my mother. Or maybe I discovered it myself one day. But I do remember I was kneeling over one, almost frozen in disbelief, until someone shouted dolphins, dolphins and I obviously had to run.

— What do you feel when you go back, now?

— Between and betwixt.

— What do you mean?

— I turn into a child when I’m there. I clap my hands with excitement when I see big waves — and the sky is all blue and crystal. It's also the place where I feel most like myself and least like I belong. I sometimes feel like that about Amsterdam too. Funny, my city, my sea… another list of belongings.

— Thank you so much, Anna Sokha, for being on Fashion Neurosis.

July 20.

I come across a note online. It makes me smile. I’ve been wearing the ocean all day, it says.

Of course.

As always, thank you for being here in this space with me. Spasibo!

Subscribe now

Share PEAR NOT BEAR

Sylvia Solovyeva may be standing before a canvas or she may be designing a garment, but she is searching for the same thing: a form that can hold something she already senses within herself.

The searching itself — when you’re searching, searching, searching — also remains much the same.

— I usually have a fairly clear idea from the beginning. But it’s buried very deep, she says. To arrive at whatever already exists inside me — that’s what’s important to me.

Still, she can’t simply sit down and bring an idea into being. Between the first feeling and the moment when form may finally feel right lies a vast expanse of thinking and struggle.

Looking at your paintings, I didn’t really find depictions of clothing as such. Mostly, you paint bodies and faces. Why did it become important for you to create clothing as an object rather than depict it?

— For some reason, art — painting in particular — feels completely separate to me, as though it has nothing to do with fashion. But when I think about fashion, art seems to flow into it. So it only works in one direction for me.

— When I paint, I look into the depth of a person. Perhaps clothing — anything external — feels distracting in that moment. I like depicting faces and bodies because through them I’m able to speak about something internal.

With clothing, Sylvia thinks like an artist first. Everything happens on the level of intuition. It begins with colour and form.

A bird in a park catches her eye. Its colours do: greenish turquoise feathers, with grey, yellow and blue in them too. The palette stays with her until it finds its way into a garment.

The garment never becomes a copy of the bird. Only the initial impulse remains.

— It’s very important that something genuinely inspires me. There has to be a spark.

So colour and form first. Only then does it become the garment. Cropped capes, mini shorts, knee-length skirts. Polka dots, plaid, argyle. Wool and silk. Angular forms. Enveloping silhouettes. Exposure and protection side by side.

There is the Sylvia who designs for herself — bolder, stranger, less concerned with wearability. Fascinated by contrasts and geometry, she prefers bright colours and confident prints over anything else. She thinks in colour and colour combinations. It’s one of her main tools.

— I’m not drawn to delicate shades.

And then there is the Sylvia who creates for Solove, the brand she started with her husband: a little more restrained, more wearable.

— When I work for Solove, I work more as a designer. Even as a commercial designer. I try to keep myself and the things I personally like in the garments, but my mindset shifts automatically. I start making everything more understandable and practical. It matters to me that these clothes are genuinely useful to people in their everyday lives.

A painting doesn’t owe anyone. Clothing does. Clothing wants a body. And so she has to think about it as a collaborator: how the garment will fit, whether it will be comfortable, whether it will flatter the person wearing it. While remaining, somehow, a little unusual. Countless fittings and alterations follow: on models, on people with different body types, so she can see how a garment actually sits in real life. She also wears the clothes herself to find out how they behave.

— But when I make something for myself, I want to be bolder. There, I allow myself much more freedom. I can create things that are completely unwearable, very bright, very expressive. In that space I can relax. I don’t think about anyone else. I simply make what I feel.

— Because that’s when, it seems to me, you can arrive at something truly interesting — something that exists on the edge between art and fashion.

The searching takes time. The thinking. It takes more time than the making itself.

But uncertainty doesn’t sit easily with her.

— Maybe it’s because I can’t fall asleep peacefully or simply go on with my life if something is left unfinished. I would rather struggle with something for a while and see it through than suffer afterward because it’s incomplete.

Do you think you’ve always been like this, I ask her.

Since childhood.

— I can't stay in a state of searching for very long. I need to arrive somewhere. Even if the result isn't perfect, I need that endpoint in order to relax.

As soon as she finds the key to one thing, she begins looking for the next.

The searching never stops.

What do you mean when you describe your work as uncompromising? What would the compromise be?

— I don’t even know how best to explain it. I think it’s that I feel very clearly what it is I’m trying to reach, and I can’t take a step to the left or one to the right.

— You have to pull it out of yourself, too. But when I finally manage to do that, it feels like a firework going off inside. As if something has happened. I feel it very intensely.

— And I understand that it may not feel that way to anyone else. But inside me, it feels like something enormous, something grand — not because it’s objectively great, but because it means so much to me personally.

This interest in clothing is also rooted in childhood. Sylvia’s grandmother was a professional seamstress. She watched her work, summer after summer, until sewing became part of her everyday life.

And Sylvia’s mother — she loved dressing flamboyantly.

— At the time, we lived in Kamchatka. It was the 90s, and she stood out tremendously from everyone around her. Sometimes people were even embarrassed to go places with her because she looked so extravagant.

— My mother used to put together rather unusual outfits for me from a very young age. I remember people coming up to me and saying, “Why is everyone dressed like a normal person, and you’re not?” Meanwhile, I might have been wearing red tights and a white skirt.

Sylvia sees herself as reserved, low-key. But clothing is one of the places where she doesn’t feel boundaries. Art is another.

Perhaps this is what her mother and grandmother gave her: the sense that clothing could be a place without fear.

Do you remember the most extravagant outfit your mother ever wore?

— Yes, perfectly. She had short hair, red lipstick, a striped dress — blue and red and short — and black platform shoes with enormous soles. To me, it seemed incredibly bold.

— And I also remember a pair of tall black boots with gold brushstrokes on them. That was already after we moved to Moscow. Everyone stared at them as if they were something completely out of the ordinary. Even I would sometimes feel a little embarrassed walking beside her.

She smiles lovingly.

But for all the boldness she inherited, Sylvia is deeply protective of her inner world. Inner balance is not a luxury but a condition for work.

— I can’t work from pain or suffering, the way many artists describe. Only when I’m calm am I able to express the emotions I carry within me.

— Of course things throw me off balance. When that happens, I need to calm myself down and gradually find my way back into that state. Perhaps that’s why I’m not a particularly open person. I’m a little inward by nature.

Which is why starting a brand was never really part of the plan.

— I’ve always been making things. One day I began sharing them on Instagram.

Gradually an audience grew.

— But I never imagined it could become something commercial. That anyone would actually want the things I was creating. I always knew my taste was rather specific.

The idea of starting a brand didn’t come from Sylvia at all. It came from her husband, Nikolai.

— Kolya insisted we give it a try.

To Sylvia, that felt almost unnatural.

— I’m the kind of person who is perfectly happy inside my own inner world. I don’t particularly want anyone interfering with it. And a brand comes with obligations. Responsibility. Difficult work. For a long time, I didn’t want any of that.

And then, after a small pause:

— Now that I look back, I realize it was the right decision. I’m genuinely grateful that someone helped me and nudged me in that direction.

Why do you feel it was the right decision?

— With a brand, you have a platform where your collections can take shape. It becomes something more substantial. And people perceive it differently. As something real. Something they can engage with, take seriously, buy, and follow.

— Although, honestly, I would have continued creating even without the brand.

Right now Solove is only Sylvia and Nikolai. She does all the designing, including making patterns, while he handles everything else. Sometimes he even delivers orders himself.

— In reality, everything rests on the two of us.

The name of the brand — Solove — does suggest an echo to her surname, Solovyova. Coincidence? Intention?

— Solovyov is Kolya’s surname, and now it’s mine as well. Silvia Solovyova has a beautiful sound to it, there’s a certain harmony there. We shortened it and thought, why not? Especially since it contains that shared root — So and Love.

A kind of expression of love. One that involves solving logistical problems few fashion brands ever have to think about.

I ask Sylvia how her clothes began travelling as far as Hollywood.

— Through Instagram.

— Everything had to happen urgently. We were looking for people flying in the right direction, trying to figure out how to get the clothes where they needed to go.

— At one point, Kolya was literally standing in an airport holding a package, hoping to find someone who could carry it onward.

— People don’t always realize that our current circumstances are different, and that sending something quickly can be incredibly difficult if not impossible.

Once a garment reaches someone, another question begins.

Are you more interested in the idea of transforming a person through clothing, or revealing what is already there?

— I think it can be both.

— I don’t like clothing for clothing’s sake.

If someone feels comfortable in a pair of jeans and a simple T-shirt, that can be more honest, better, and perhaps even more attractive, she says, than something overly styled or elaborate.

I really love this idea, I tell her.

Clothing should be a reflection of something internal, she continues. It’s important that the person and the clothing become part of the same whole, the same organism.

— I share my more creative ideas on Instagram, but in my own life I wear whatever feels comfortable to me.

In everyday life that would be a skirt. Knee-length or slightly below.

— I’ve always felt comfortable in that length. It feels like me.

She says she could happily dress like Miuccia Prada every day. A pleated skirt. A simple top. Tights. Shoes with a small heel.

— That would be enough for me.

Certain elements return again and again throughout Sylvia’s own collections. Sometimes it begins very simply: something catches her eye and stays.

The cape is one of them.

— It was very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, but at some point people forgot about it. I like returning to things that have faded away. Then you suddenly begin to see them differently.

More than its history, though, Sylvia is interested in what a cape does to the body.

— A cape is both restrictive and liberating at the same time. It changes the way you inhabit your body. In it, you don’t feel the way you do in a regular blazer or jacket.

Sylvia’s is not an ordinary cape. It’s cropped. It covers, it reveals. Come closer. But not too close.

She is equally fascinated by rhythm. Plaids, argyle, polka dots, houndstooth — she keeps returning to them.

— What I love about prints is that they already contain a certain movement. When you combine them, something very interesting begins to happen. Everything starts interacting, almost dancing together. Or when you use the same print but on different fabrics, it’s a completely different feeling.

Then there are the mini shorts.

Provocative, very much so. But never merely provocative. Styled with wool, tights, richly textured fabrics, even the most daring pieces can feel covered — almost concealed.

— I don’t like things that are exposed for the sake of exposure. I’m interested in something subtle — something bold, provocative and strange at the same time.

She traces this fascination partly to retro aesthetics.

— In the 1950s and 1960s there was a particular kind of sexuality — refined, delicate, sometimes playful. Bold and innocent at once.

That is the balance she keeps searching for.

— I enjoy playing with combinations that seem as though they shouldn’t work together — pairing something sheer with wool.

Ironically, the strangest garment she ever made became a bestseller: furry ultra-mini shorts covered with hand-sewn polka dots.

— I created them simply to attract attention. I was convinced nobody would want them.

Instead, everyone did. In Russia and abroad.

She ended up making every order herself because no outside atelier wanted to take on the work. Every single polka dot had to be sewn on by hand.

— And if you go to an independent seamstress who works for herself, the cost becomes astronomical. In the end, it would be impossible to sell the piece at a reasonable price.

— I spent the whole winter making those shorts and thinking, My God, why did I ever come up with this idea?

And yet, she says, there is another side to it.

— Honestly, it gives me enormous joy to know that my clothes are travelling like that. That a part of my world becomes part of someone else’s.

People wear them.

They live in them.

— It’s a very unusual feeling. When something separates from you and begins its own journey.

When you think about a garment, do you think first about its form, or about how you hope someone will feel in it?

She pauses.

— Probably the form. I think that comes from the way artists tend to think.

This surprises me.

— I don’t really think about how someone should feel. Every person brings their own state into a garment anyway, their own way of experiencing themselves.

— When I create clothing for myself, it’s through form that I try to get there — to express my character, my inner sense of things.

Perhaps for Sylvia, form is not the expression of an inner state so much as a way of arriving at it.

How do you recognize the point at which an image begins to overwhelm the person wearing it? Is there a distinction, for you, between expressiveness and theatricality?

— Yes. A very clear one.

But it is difficult to explain.

She says it comes from a lifetime of looking: films, fashion, art, music. Everything settles somewhere inside you until, eventually, intuition begins to speak.

— At a certain point, you simply know: this is harmonious, there is something real here. Whereas this is just a collection of trends.

— Afterward I can analyse it. But when I create, I rely on intuition first. I know it won’t let me down. But I do think things through too. And in the end, it all comes together — my intuition, my thoughts, everything I’ve absorbed over the years.

When a designer works from a genuine personal vision, she believes, it is always visible. It always comes through.

There is meaning there, and there is necessity.

What do you feel when you encounter something like that?

A soft smile appears.

— It’s almost a kind of ecstasy. Sometimes it even brings me to tears.

Not beauty in any conventional sense. But beauty that feels deeply personal.

— You look at it and think: How beautiful things can be in this world.

I wasn’t going to ask which designers provoke that kind of feeling in her, I tell her. Although perhaps I should.

— Among the big names, Jonathan Anderson and Dries Van Noten.

— But honestly, beautiful things can come from anywhere. Sometimes from someone who is only just beginning.

She admits she would never create something that has no connection to her.

— I’m a fairly principled person.

— I won’t do things for the sake of reach or popularity. If I’m creating something, there has to be a part of it that genuinely moves me.

— I can’t go against myself.

Nor is she interested in pleasing everyone.

— I don’t need everyone to wear my clothes.

— I don’t need wealthy or famous people simply for the sake of status.

What matters is that everything happens out of love. That someone chooses a piece because they truly like it. Because, somehow, they find something of themselves in it.

Having loved both clothing and painting since childhood, why did you choose to study art?

— Because painting came first.

— For a long time, I believed it was the most important thing to me. And honestly, somewhere deep inside, art may still be the most important thing.

It’s just that later she began sewing, and things developed very naturally in that direction. Through clothing, she found her audience — or maybe the world found her.

Paintings are more difficult, she says. People find it harder to step into art than they do with clothing.

Museums, drawing schools, theatre — all of it was part of her life from the very beginning.

— We went to the theatre so often that one theatre’s security guard eventually assumed my mother must be an actress there. We were there almost every evening.

Teachers who encouraged rather than restrained her.

And above all, her mother, who took her everywhere.

Sylvia’s parents divorced when she was five, and she and her mother moved to Moscow. Kamchatka stayed with her father.

— I think it was everything together that formed me.

She pauses.

— Or rather, my mother did.

People can live without fashion, she says. It’s not medicine. It’s not a profession on which lives depend.

— But I simply do what I know how to do. I don’t really know how to do anything else.

Here, she says, she grows. Here, her heart is on fire.

— So it’s better that I spend my life doing what is truly mine.

— And yet, of course, we can live without fashion. Just as we can live without ballet.

But for some reason people continue devoting themselves to these things. Perhaps, she says, they make life a little better.

In hindsight, it was never a story of a painter becoming a fashion designer at all, I don’t think.

It’s a story of a woman trying, over and over, to give shape to something she already feels inside herself.

Painting is one form.

Fashion is another.

As always, thank you for being here in this space with me and PEAR NOT BEAR heroes. Spasibo!

Subscribe now

— May I mention your name in the article? I ask.

— Of course. You can mention my surname too.

He smiles, leaning back in his chair. The wall behind him — bare.

Mikhail (Michael) Rudikov.

Later he will describe himself as someone deeply uninterested in becoming the face of his own brand. The founder of TCHUR wants his work to speak for itself.

It does.

The world of TCHUR could smell of incense, candle wax, the slightly damp interior of a very old Orthodox church. It could sound like Orthodox chanting. Its figures move somewhere between holy fool, wanderer, monk, and trickster.

In between.

He is twenty-six years old.

— Fuck. Already twenty-six. That’s scary.

He was sixteen when clothing first took hold of him. Obsessed with Supreme, Stüssy, and Palace — and books — he moved through Moscow’s streetwear scene while studying philosophy at university.

Michael grew up on the outskirts of Moscow, in an ordinary family: a retired army officer for a father, generations of English teachers on his mother’s side. No artists, no intellectual circles, no particular visual environment.

He has read obsessively since high school, but there was nobody around him to discuss books with: life moved between classroom, streetwear, and parties.

Before long, the interests multiplied faster than he could organize them: fashion, philosophy, cinema, drawing, music — gym too.

— I’m interested in everything. Maybe I fixate a little too hard.

— And once I start digging into something, I tend to go very far with it. I’m not interested in staying on the surface.

Soon he encountered Yohji Yamamoto and Martin Margiela, and the entire logic of clothing seemed to rearrange itself. Wide hakama-inspired trousers began appearing in the collections of his streetwear label, Victorian Fall, even as he realized the crowd around it wasn’t exactly full of avant-garde enthusiasts.

Eventually he abandoned the brand and started over. In life too.

When military mobilization began in Russia, Michael left — he hasn’t gone back. The first year afterward was pure upheaval: too much free time, too many countries, constant movement.

— For about a year and a half, I was trying to figure out how to begin again. Clothing and fashion are a medium I genuinely love. Both the end result and the process feel right to me. But I needed to understand what, exactly, I was searching for in fashion.

In that time — moving through Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, and now Serbia — Michael discovered what is often called artisanal fashion: the British designers Paul Harnden, Elena Dawson, John Skelton. Antique fabrics. Old-world techniques. Small production runs. Garments designed now that seemed already inhabited by another life.

What would a Russian equivalent of that philosophy look like? He started digging.

— And so I’m trying to understand what the Russian soul is…

He draws ‘soul’ out almost like a chant.

— Mostly I’m trying to understand it for myself. Because Russian history is such an entanglement of unimaginable circumstances.

— Recently I started thinking that maybe I don’t know at all what that is. Maybe you can only grasp a certain feeling and try to transmit it.

It’s one reason Michael gravitates toward fashion: what language cannot hold can still be carried visually and passed to another person.

— How do you even describe it? Some kind of longing for an ideal.

Like repairing something carefully even while assuming it probably won’t last.

— That feeling that everything might be possible, and at the same time that nothing will truly work out. Dostoevsky is very much to blame for that.

— There’s a strong sense of tragedy in it. And exhaustion too. Even toska — that ache of unrealized possibility.

He pauses.

— Is there an equivalent of toska in Dutch? There isn’t one in English.

Michael collects photographs from the early twentieth century. It’s important to preserve the memory of ordinary people — family archives eventually end up at flea markets and antique fairs.

Vanished worlds.

1917. The single most important year in Russian history. First the February Revolution, then October. After that begins an entirely different reality.

— For me, it’s a tragedy. A total rupture.

The first TCHUR collection was partly dedicated to the ‘former people’ — those social classes for whom there was no longer any place in the new Soviet state.

The old intelligentsia — bureaucrats, officers, aristocrats, clergy. By 1937, almost all who remained had been eliminated.

Michael describes one image in particular: a monk serving his sentence in a cassock. On his head, a budenovka with the red star ripped off.

And how do you experience this physically? That state you enter when looking at images from the past? Does your heart tighten?

— I’m an anxious person in general. And of course it depends on the kind of photographs. If it’s court archives, for example — especially Gulag photographs, the ‘before and after’ images — those are very difficult to look at. Very difficult.

There are funny photographs too — people fooling around, making photomontages where they hold their own heads in their hands.

Michael deliberately tries to limit himself to that period: pre- and post-revolution Russia, from the late nineteenth century up through roughly the 1940s. Not because he romanticises imperial Russia — he does not — but because he is drawn to periods where one reality dissolves and another has not yet fully arrived.

— So what do I feel? Curiosity. The way people posed, the way they dressed, the way they looked, the kinds of faces they had. There’s something alluring about it. Something already lost to us.

Do you remember a particular moment or image when you first felt this state of ‘in-betweenness’ for yourself?

— Probably when I started working on the first collection. It took me a year and a half. Through the process, I was trying to feel out my own visual language. Some of it I made in Georgia, some of it in Bulgaria by the sea.

That winter he was living in an unheated summer house, walking around in a puffer jacket, sleeping under a mattress because it was freezing inside. Everything happened chaotically. There was no unity yet.

But toward the end, things started coming together intuitively. He began assembling looks from the garments he had made, and suddenly realized that they were all somehow connected.

— And I thought: there’s something here. Some kind of in-between state — between dream and reality.

TCHUR.

On one hand, these garments refer to historical prototypes that genuinely existed. Yet on the other, you could never really come across these exact things in real archives. The fabrics are wrong. Certain construction details are intentionally distorted. Neither fully there nor fully here.

— Yes, they would recognize the familiar cut, the silhouette of a blazer. But then the blazer itself is made from a striped fabric that, at the time, you’d probably only see in a circus.

Clothing was governed far more strictly then. Say, you couldn’t just step out without a hat. Everything was heavily regulated: salute properly and move along.

Michael thinks through characters: holy fools and fathers, wanderers, tricksters, monks.

He pushes toward absurdity in his work, drawing on buffoonery, clowning, grotesque performance — the skomorokh tradition.

— I’m trying to get closer to that: tricksters, holy fools — all of this is part of our culture. It’s just spread very thinly across everyday life, and I’m trying to lift it out, condense it as much as possible.

— Although maybe none of this is true at all. Maybe these are just my own hallucinations.

Maybe not. Independent Russian fashion publications have already begun taking notice of TCHUR. And collectors too.

The deeper Michael dug, the more everything seemed to lead back to Orthodoxy.

What pulls him is not religion — he has many questions for the Christian God — but Christian imagery, ritual, sacrifice, aesthetics.

— I love icons deeply. I collect them. I study them as artworks. I don’t pray to them, no.

— I also collect incense. Burn it sometimes, smell it.

Ecclesiastical garments fascinated him too: cassocks, undercassocks, chitons. Almost nobody in fashion works directly with those forms.

So he began there.

— I found this amazing book with garment patterns for cassocks from the early twentieth century. Honestly, the cut itself hasn’t really changed much — they still make them more or less the same way.

There’s the Russian Orthodox cassock — the diagonal collar, the double-breasted undercassock. Then Greek cassocks, Bulgarian ones. And the sleeve on the Russian cassock is especially interesting: the armhole drops all the way down to around the waist.

— So you get this batwing sleeve that allows freedom of movement. And because of the pleats, it looks incredibly beautiful from the back. If you take the pattern and imagine inflating it with air, it almost rises into the shape of a T. That kind of construction — it’s just endlessly fascinating to me.

— I also work with the Catholic cassock because it’s more recognizable. Neo in The Matrix is basically wearing a leather cassock.

The Russian Orthodox undercassock was then transformed into vests, blazers, and coats.

Is it important to you that your clothes become part of everyday life?

— Of course. I make very wearable clothes. Some pieces are more everyday — trousers, blazers. Others are less so — cassocks, long chiton-like shirts. Those are naturally harder to sell. But I also have looks you could easily wear walking around the city.

A lot depends on the person. Michael himself doesn’t like standing out.

— I don’t like people looking at me. I’m actually a pretty ordinary designer in that sense — I don’t enjoy attracting attention. Although my appearance itself tends to draw attention a bit.

Why do you work specifically with menswear?

— Honestly, I never really consciously thought about making womenswear. Although I do have a female audience — women buy quite a lot of my clothes.

I understand why, I tell him. Some of those looks I could absolutely imagine wearing myself.

— My work leans toward ambiguity. I think that probably comes from something personal. I have long hair — I’ve worn it like this my whole life — and people constantly mistake me for a woman: “Girls, let’s chat!”

There’s something androgynous about him. Maybe it’s why he’s drawn to how angels are depicted in iconography — feminine young men suspended somewhere between genders.

Somehow it fits: an angelic young man wearing an old Eminem T-shirt.

— Ah, the T-shirt is very old, maybe ten or eleven years old already. I love Eminem, although these days I mostly listen to more experimental jazz.

TCHUR is menswear mostly from the standpoint of construction. A lot of the techniques he uses come from the past — techniques that have largely disappeared. Back then every tailor developed their own methods, passing knowledge from master to apprentice.

He could sew the same waistcoat five completely different ways.

— But like I said, women still buy my 'menswear.' And they like it.

And not just clothes. There is something deeply compelling about Michael’s world, and about the men he casts in it. Not romantic exactly — more like a feeling that these figures make you want to follow them.

— Yes, it exists on a kind of sensory level. And maybe that’s exactly what I wanted to convey.

Michael works with all these unusual fabrics, antique fabrics — he finds them at auctions, or on resale, where elderly women — or their children — sell off fabric they’ve been storing since their youth. And usually there are only two or three meters available.

— It gives the clothes a very particular feeling, and a very particular approach to making them, but there are also obvious constraints.

Does anyone help you?

— It’s important to me that my patterns are truly professional. I obsess a lot over fit. I want the garments to be comfortable, to sit properly on as many different people as possible.

Having studied the technical side — having really dug into it — Michael found pattern makers, young guys in Kazan, who understand what he’s trying to do. He’s trying to find a compromise between that older kind of comfort when every pattern was made exclusively for one person and making garments that still work for various body types.

— My guys are great.

There’s a huge amount of handwork in TCHUR clothing, a lot of old techniques. Finding people who actually know how to do that — or are even willing to try — is very difficult.

— I sew. I’ve been sewing for around five years now, although I’m still not fully satisfied with my skill level. But I found several really good tailors here in Serbia — Russian guys. Novi Sad has a huge Russian diaspora now. Because honestly, if I had to sew everything myself, I’d lose my mind.

They sew the garments, and then Michael does the hand-finished buttonholes afterwards. And now they do them too, he says — he taught them how.

When you say ‘handmade,’ do you mean literally by hand?

— Yes, literally. Needle and thread. It really annoys me when people write things like ‘a hoodie sewn by hand.’ What does that even mean?

A blazer can be assembled entirely by machine, or it can be made in an artisanal way, with an immense amount of hand stitching involved. Things like attaching the lining by hand. In the end it looks better and is more functional: hand stitches are much more flexible and mobile.

The whole construction becomes more alive.

There are certain elements you can only really do properly by hand. Some pockets, for example.

— And because I work with 1917 as a reference point, that period still contained a huge amount of hand labor. It’s important to me to transmit that feeling.

— Whenever I find antique garments, I study very carefully how they were made. Including the way previous owners repaired them. The history of the object matters to me too.

Ideally, he’d love to work with old fabrics only. But it’s expensive. And for now he still doesn’t have the freedom to travel around Europe searching for materials himself.

So he works with new fabrics too. Deadstock, mostly. And with local weavers.

— There are these Russian guys who restored antique weaving looms and now weave incredibly beautiful wool — traditional, artisanal wool.

— There’s also this tiny Serbian fabric shop run by an elderly mother and her grown son.

He even ended up modelling a cassock-coat — from that local wool — for TCHUR: “Vladimir, time to be photographed. You’re very beautiful.”

Whenever Michael works with new textiles, he ages them to remove a bit of that untouched polish. He washes them down a little, soaks them in water with vinegar, dries them in the sun.

He also brings materials from Russia. No, his wife brings them — she travels back and forth. Homespun textiles, various peasant craft fabrics.

A self-taught tailor with a growing collection of antique scissors, he can sew by hand for three, four, five hours straight — he has the endurance for that, he tells me. But at the same time, he can’t keep making the same type of garment over and over. He’ll sew a couple of waistcoats, and then that’s it — he can’t even look at waistcoats anymore.

— Then eventually I get tired of fabric altogether. Let me show you… I work with leather too, actually. I’m making leather hats for the new collection. Here, look.

A vegetable-tanned leather hat. He compares it, fondly, to a khinkali — a pleated Georgian dumpling.

Is there a detail in your garments that viewers or owners usually don’t notice, but that feels essential to you personally?

— When I accidentally pierce my hand while sewing, some tiny invisible mark remains. But it’s not something fundamentally important to me — more of an amusing detail.

What really matters to Michael are the seams sewn by his own hands.

What happens to a person when they wear TCHUR?

— I’ve never really asked around.

But he would want his clothing to feel like a second skin. He’d want the person to wear it and almost stop noticing they’re wearing clothes at all.

— First and foremost, I want them to wear themselves.

— That’s why I try to make everything as well as possible — so a garment can last five, ten years. And most importantly, so it can later be repaired.

Though not always.

— My wife tells me the truth directly. She might say, “Redo this, you’re half-assing it here.”

There are times, he admits, he doesn’t have enough inner strength to pull himself together and make things the way they should be made.

What does inner strength mean to you?

— To sit down and really do the research instead of thinking, “Eh, this is good enough.”

— My themes are often quite heavy. They send me into depression sometimes.

It’s foolishness and joy he wants to give the world. Deep down, he says, he’s basically a clown by nature.

And he wants people to fool around.

TCHUR.

A strange word, Slavic, folkloric, incantatory. It feels old in the mouth. It has several meanings, but all of them lead to boundaries, ritual, protection.

What Michael seeks is a space between dream and reality.

Why was it important for you to emphasize your Slavic origins in the name of the brand?

— Because I work with Russia. It’s important for me to make that visible.

Tchur exists only in Slavic languages. There’s nothing like it in other linguistic families. And yet, it still echoes church.

— But for me this is also something deeply personal — an attempt to understand for myself what the Russian cultural code actually is.

Explaining it — impossible.

But watch a film by Andrei Tarkovsky, and somehow you immediately feel it. Read Fyodor Dostoevsky and you’ll find some fragments of it there.

Go attend a liturgy in an Orthodox church.

Or look at the garments made by TCHUR.

As always, thank you for being here in this space with me and PEAR NOT BEAR heroes. Spasibo!

Subscribe now

The piano has started. Brief turns. Rhythm more than melody.

I imagine a heavy sky over the sea, ready to break into rain — now. An albatross glides along the shifting line where water meets water. It plunges, then soars, then is gone once more. The bird is not flapping; it is carried.

The music falls quiet yet alert. Something is about to take shape.

I wanted to follow it. I asked my music teacher to let me learn the piece — not for the following year’s competition, not for recognition. I just wanted to be part of what I sensed as a gift moving between artists.

Rodion Shchedrin and Maya Plisetskaya — composer and dancer — were collaborators and spouses for nearly six decades. He did not write In the Manner of Albéniz specifically for her, yet many of his best-known works seem keyed to her line and intensity. At fifteen the distinction did not matter to me. What changes if beauty is first passed between makers, and only then encountered by us?

Prima ballerina assoluta. Absolute first ballerina. A dancer who alters the art form itself.

Watching Plisetskaya perform Swan Lake in Moscow in 1956, American author Truman Capote wrote: “Her arms—her not-to-be-believed arms—were like articulated wands, and her long legs tapered to a pair of silk-shod feet that seemed to hover a thin distance above reality.”

Maya Plisetskaya wryly wondered what the authorities would have done to showcase Soviet cultural life if Tchaikovsky hadn’t written Swan Lake. She danced it more than 800 times across her career.

It’s impossible to know what the authorities might have turned to instead. But we know what was done during Stalin’s purges. Her father, a Soviet official, had employed a former secretary of Leon Trotsky — Stalin’s rival — and in 1939 he was accused of treachery and executed soon after. Her mother, a theatre and silent film actress, was deported to a labour camp.

Plisetskaya was twelve.

Those “articulated wands” seemed capable of expressing what could not otherwise be said.

She was taken in by her aunt, a principal dancer of the Bolshoi who later became one of its prominent teachers. Within this classical tradition she developed an intensity that felt almost unclassical — modern. Plisetskaya became known for an uncommon clarity of line. Her arms stretched beyond their limits, and in every movement — a contained electricity.

Because of her family history she was not permitted to tour abroad until Nikita Khrushchev himself lifted the restriction in 1959. When she finally stepped her silk-shod foot in the West, she was recognized immediately.

Does one build style, or enter it as something already there — but only yours to occupy?

Her dancing suggested something like minimalist design: the fewer the gestures, the more visible their necessity. Her style was expressiveness achieved through precision. She was not ethereal; she was exact. She seemed to hover above reality — but not in escape. In resistance.

Photographers Irving Penn and Richard Avedon captured her that way, even in stillness.

Head tilt. Uncompromising back. Vertical silhouette. Maximum intensity, held in a minimum.

That same form lives in Yves Saint Laurent.

Plisetskaya does away with transitional softness and that elongates her line. Saint Laurent eschews decorative interruption and that elevates his. In both, the uninterrupted line leaves no place to rest — the eye must stay.

Looking fully is an effort.

She didn’t invent new steps. She made them appear new.

Shchedrin’s In the Manner of Albéniz sounded like Maya Plisetskaya to me.

Almost angular, the music swells, tiptoes, trills; I half-expect a Carmen onstage, her electric kohl-lined eyes, her gestures — a fluid geometry.

Carmen became one of her defining roles. For Carmen Suite, Shchedrin reshaped Bizet’s opera into a ballet score written for her movement. It is also recognisably his.

When a composer writes for a dancer, whose style is it? I’m starting to think that style may not belong entirely to an individual. I’m starting to see it as a space multiple artists can inhabit at once. It is not that Shchedrin borrows her style, or that the choreographer merely adjusts his sensibility to hers. But somehow they all seem to recognise the same form. Does style persist through difference? Or does it dissolve there, mistaken for resemblance?

What was it that I thought on stage playing In the Manner of Albéniz a year later? Unattainable beauty. Uncharted mastery. But I can be part of it now because the albatross I imagined is as real as Plisetskaya’s one-act Carmen.

Do I still think that? Perhaps differently. Beauty doesn’t suddenly become attainable, but it proves transmissible. Something shifts — attention sharpens, a quickening of heartbeat, a long inhale, the body is there sooner than the mind.

At the piano, at fifteen, my fingers racing, nipping at the keys, I felt a pang of hunger. I never saw Maya Plisetskaya live.

There is a photograph of her in front of a drawer full of pointe shoes. There is something about the way she holds a pair that holds me.

She doesn’t seem to show them so much as to be caught mid-gesture or mid-thought, smiling. There is a mischief in her eyes.

One pointe is lifted up near her chin, turned inward so the sole faces her — something to lean on. Her fingers don’t grip it tightly; they cradle it.

The other pointe sits lower in her opposite hand, and this one she holds more tightly, the grip more closed.

One held, one held onto.

I don’t know what it means, but I keep thinking about this contrast.

As always, thank you for being here in this space with me. Spasibo!

PS. Dear Reader, there is now an option for a paid subscription to PEAR NOT BEAR. If you’d like to support this work and have the means, you can. Thank you.

Subscribe now

When Anna Priakhina speaks about jewellery, ornament is not the central question. A piece may begin in glass and heat, but it comes fully into being only when someone picks it up — and cannot quite let it go. What matters is not only the object itself, but what happens between it and the person who wears it.

What happens then is often a kind of love. Some say immediately, “That’s it, I’m taking this with me.” Others touch a piece first and return later to buy it, saying, “I’ve been thinking about that ring this whole time.” Love — and a little bit of fear. Because a ring like that changes the way you behave. You don’t toss it onto a table; you return it carefully to its box. It’s like having a pet. It asks something of you.

Jewellery like this also gives something back — a new experience. And it has a beautiful sound. People who wear Anna’s earrings say they can hear them softly ringing, like crystal at a wedding table. The rings can chime as well.

— If someone receives my jewellery accidentally — as a gift, for example — it can be nice, of course. But the person didn’t choose it themselves. They may not understand what it requires or know how to care for it. And then nothing really happens between them. The piece remains without attention, without love.

You describe your practice as an experiment on the path toward art. At what moment do you feel that the experiment has succeeded: when a result is found, or when something changes within you?

— For me, an experiment is about process — about searching. If I create something, arrive somewhere new, gain knowledge or experience, then everything is unfolding as it should.

That search didn’t begin with jewellery at all. In fact, Anna’s brand itself — ANNA PRIAKHINA — grew out of that exploration. Her original intention was to study glass as a material for creating art objects. Too often, while looking for workshops where she could learn professional glassmaking techniques, the answer was the same: sorry, prior technical experience is required.

— And my response was: if you think I won’t reach that level, then this isn’t the right place for me.

Eventually she found places willing to teach her. In that moment she didn’t yet imagine that jewellery would become her medium.

— If you want to arrive at something big, you have to begin with something small. I started by making my first pieces — simple jewellery, though even then I was already working in my own style.

Her very first ring was a giant flower with five large transparent petals — the piece that soon appeared on the runway.

Anna began working with Alexandra Gapanovich while still a photographer. Both are from Murmansk, in the Far North, and for years Anna photographed Sasha’s campaigns and lookbooks. When she later began experimenting with glass, she showed Alexandra a small series of early pieces.

In that moment, the experiment drew Anna into fashion.

— I brought my small boxes and said, “Look at what I’ve been doing.” Sasha showed them to her stylist, who shapes the conceptual direction of her collections, and she immediately said, “Take everything.”

They had been looking for jewellery designers whose work came closer to art objects than to conventional jewellery, but had struggled to find anyone working in that way. The jewellery became part of Tsar-Devitsa (Tsarina Maiden), a collection inspired by Pushkin’s fairy tale and presented at Moscow Fashion Week.

In an experiment, what’s more important to you: the risk of making a mistake, or the freedom of not knowing where you’ll end up?

— I don’t really like mistakes. I’m actually afraid of them. The risk of making a mistake pushes me to think through every detail carefully.

When Anna enters a new field, her instinct is to understand it as fully as she can.

— That’s why I studied a range of glasswork techniques — and types of glass — without knowing whether I would need them later. And that is precisely what made experimentation possible. When I began developing jewellery for Sasha Gapanovich’s Eudialyte collection from scratch — for all 35 looks — I already had certain skills, including some I hadn’t even used before. I thought: “Wait, I do know how to do this. I’ve even bought the materials for it already.”

— Many people hesitate to learn something without knowing whether they will use it. But with every new skill, a new need inevitably appears. I find that kind of readiness to be a great tool for an artist.

There are also practical realities. Working with glass in Murmansk often means working in a state of waiting. Certain types of glass can be difficult to obtain, deliveries can take time, tools are not always available.

— While I was working on the collection, I would occasionally run out of gas for the torch — and the gas cylinder can only be refilled on weekdays, before 5 p.m. So you end up literally running through the city with the cylinder, trying to refill it in time to continue working over the weekend.

For Anna, art emerges when a work feels necessary to its moment, when it feels impossible not to make it.

For you, is creating every day more like a first day or a last day?

— For me, it’s important that it feels like a first day. I always associate it with the beginning of a new collection, the beginning of an experiment. You take a breath — and with that breath everything else begins to emerge.

— A “last day” usually feels more like a deadline. You’re scrambling to finish the final pieces, pack them, send them off to a show. On the same day!

— If we’re talking about a “last day” in an existential sense, then I probably wouldn’t do anything at all. I would simply go out into nature — lie down in the grass. Or in the snow.

Is there a moment when the work stops moving towards art?

— You can create objects that serve a purpose, repeat them, produce them, sell them. But when the work becomes primarily about repetition, it begins to belong more to craft.

— What matters for me is whether a piece contains my own statement. When that is present, then for me it becomes art.

From the beginning, she resisted the idea that her work might become a brand.

— I would say to a friend who came to my studio, filmed videos and posted them on Instagram: “I’m not going to start a brand. I’m not going to sell jewellery. I’m an artist. I want to create art.” Meanwhile he was posting the videos, with captions like “Look at the jewellery Anya is making!”

At a certain point, however, the demand for her work had already fully formed: she was creating a new jewellery collection for Sasha Gapanovich — and it would be shown at a specific place and time.

For Anna, art also depends on the moment in which a statement enters the world. If something remains stored in a studio, the work has not yet fully taken place. It does when it appears in an exhibition, at an art fair — or on the runway.

— It is very important for me to remain in that space. I would lose interest if I moved solely to craft.

Alongside jewellery, Anna Priakhina works with sound, live coding, and circuit bending.

Her practice moves between art and technology, exploring how technological systems might bring human beings into new relation with the natural world.

She recalls an installation by sound artist Roman Golovko that left a strong impression on her: a room filled with suspended tree trunks that began to vibrate when embraced. The work invited visitors to touch and feel a response. She spent a long time in that room. She returned to the exhibition more than once. It has stayed with her ever since, perhaps because it suggested a way technology might bring us closer to something living — to nature.

What do jewellery pieces allow you to express that cannot be conveyed through sound or technology?

— Sound and code are transient. Jewellery remains with a person, becomes part of their daily environment. It is also a form of wearable art. When a person wears a piece, that relationship begins to take shape — they connect with it, and with something I’ve placed within it.

— The wearer complements the piece and my statement with their own message, their own perspective. Their appearance becomes a reflection of what they wish to express outwardly.

— In a sense, people themselves become a kind of medium for my art. Through them, the work enters the world.

— So when a piece of jewellery comes to you, your energy meets what’s already in it. In that moment, you and I create something new together.

Before any piece could enter the world, Anna had to learn to let go of them. At the beginning, she didn’t want to part with anything at all.

— If I feel that a piece is ‘mine’, I keep it and make another one.

How do you know it’s ‘yours’?

— It’s an inner feeling that I want this exact piece and not a duplicate. Goosebumps, a sense of wonder, those small involuntary gasps of excitement. When you create a repeat, it becomes something else entirely. Your attention shifts — instead of creating, you’re focused on reproducing.

— But in that first moment, you assemble through feeling, sensing how it comes together. You don’t yet know what it will look like in the end — you only have a rough idea, and you build it intuitively.

She had this with a piece called Tentacles. A powerful object in blown glass. When she completed it, her immediate reaction was, “My God, this is mine.” But Anna had to send it for the Eudialyte show. Later she asked for it back. She’d make another one, if necessary. But that particular piece remains hers.

— I’ve noticed that the objects I create as if for myself are often the ones that resonate most with others. For example, I might send rings out for a shoot and think, “They’ll come back — I’ll wear them.”

But sometimes they don’t. Stylists or models end up buying them on the spot.

Looking at your jewellery, especially the pieces you created for Alexandra Gapanovich — whose work is deeply connected to Murmansk and the Far North1 — I sense a kind of elemental rawness, a certain natural strength.

— Yes, I feel very aligned with Sasha in relation to the North and to nature. The North captivates me. Even though I was born and lived half of my life in the South, I feel very comfortable here.

— The North gives off a great deal of energy, perhaps because here we remain closer to what feels untouched. People remain along the shore, and beyond that begins the North Pole.

Anna didn’t consciously try to embed the idea of nature into her jewellery. Rather than assigning fixed meanings, she prefers to observe how people meet the work.

— Someone might take a piece and say, “There is nature in this.” And it’s not a literal reference — even in something as minimal as a ring with a sphere, people still perceive something of nature.

Why glass?

— At one point I simply felt that I needed to work with glass. People asked me, “Why?” And I would say, “I don’t know — but I need it. I don’t know what will come of it.”

— Glass has a remarkable quality: unlike stones, it does not seem to retain energy. Pure, transparent glass feels light and open. It allows things to pass through it.

— I feel very drawn to this quality — it creates a sense of lightness, even a sense of goodness.

Sometimes the torch stays on for over an hour. The studio is quiet. Suddenly, the sound of a crack. Another one. “No… what’s happening? Please don’t explode!”

Glass crackles, and that sound brings a whole range of feelings — anxiety, excitement, sometimes fear. A small crack means a fracture has appeared somewhere inside the piece. She has to find it.

There’s a kind of mental readiness when approaching glass. A moment of saying to herself, “Alright, let’s go.”

If the air is too cold, it can undo almost everything she’s been working on. When hot glass cools unevenly, internal tension builds. And suddenly a large piece she’s been assembling for an hour can crack or lose an element.

In moments like that Anna sighs, and says, “Alright, I’ll go have some tea.”

If you imagine the senses as instruments, which one would be easiest for you to part with: touch, smell, sight, or hearing?

— I think it would probably be easiest for me to part with smell. I’m a very visual person. I love beauty, and I try to make sure the space around me is beautiful as well. Sight is very important to me. But touch is also extremely important — the ability to touch things, to feel them physically.

— Although, of course, I’m not sure how I would drink my favourite tea without the sense of smell…

She takes a sip…

— No, I probably couldn’t give it up after all.

If you look closely at Anna’s glass, you’ll notice something else there: metal. It comes in at the assembling stage. Ready-made fittings — even gold or silver ones — just wouldn’t do it. They just don’t match.

— Beauty for me is not in perfect or standard forms, but in something new — something created specifically for that piece. That’s when I realized I wanted to learn metalwork as well. I wanted my collections to have not only unique glass elements, but also unique metal ones.

Working with glass and metal as both your mediums and materials, have there been decisions you later wanted to change?

— Quite often objects I make for the runway are truly experimental and remain purely runway pieces. In real life such heavy earrings, for example, simply wouldn’t be wearable.

— Runway pieces are similar to clothing: not everything shown on the runway is meant to be worn in everyday life. Some things are just meant to be part of the show itself, part of the statement.

— When we create a collection, I find it crucial that it is shown in its entirety during Fashion Week. Even if later, for sale, some pieces need to be adjusted in size or made lighter.

How do you come up with names for your jewellery pieces?

— In a way, I don’t really have names — I have sensations connected to the pieces. But in this world everything needs a name, so I end up with simple titles. Flower for a ring, or Berry Jam for a necklace. Or just numbers.

Anna Priakhina on beauty —

Beauty is an experience. When I see something: what do I feel? If I feel a sense of beauty, then for me it is beautiful. It is deeply connected to what we are used to seeing, to each person’s taste, to a personal relationship with what we encounter visually.

Ugliness, on the other hand, is not an experience for me. It’s a word people use — and I really dislike it — to describe a kind of mismatch: when a person or form doesn’t fit into what they consider normal or understandable.

But it is not an aesthetic impression. It is simply fear.

There was a period in my life that shaped how I think about this. I was three and a half when I spent some time in a hospital, the youngest child there.

The other children were up to fifteen years old, and many of them had different physical conditions or visible differences. The doctors were helping them through surgeries.

For me they were all beautiful because I didn’t think of them as different. We read the same fairy tales, spent time together, and played. The word ugliness didn’t even exist for me then.

It still doesn’t.

It’s in her nature, Anna says, to try new things and then keep moving forward. But not this time. This time she wants to continue creating jewellery.

— I really love what happens between me and the world through these pieces.

Through these pieces, Anna Priakhina remains in contact with the world. And the world with her.

Thank you for reading PEAR NOT BEAR. Spasibo!

Subscribe now

For some time he had been meaning to look at the family photo album, still there in her home. Winter kept intervening. The days were thin. There was always something else to do.

When he finally went, it was ostensibly for something practical. But once inside, it became clear that this wasn’t why he had come. On some quieter level, he had been moving toward the album all along.

For Sasha Barbakov, clothing begins this way: as a return. Memory in his work is not abstract. It has weight.

You often speak about nostalgia. It’s a curious time: there are older generations who feel nostalgic for what they had, and younger ones who feel nostalgic for something they never had and can no longer have.

— Yes, it’s very much a phenomenon of our time. In my collections I talk a lot about the Soviet era. And sometimes people ask me: how can you possibly feel nostalgic about the Soviet period? Of course, I can’t be nostalgic for something I never actually lived through.

His own nostalgia — so present in his recent releases — is connected to personal memories: his grandmother, summers at the dacha when he was little.

— At the same time, I’m drawn to a kind of nostalgia for something I never experienced. There’s even a word for it — I think it’s called anemoia. For me, it’s a desire to feel that time, an attempt to be there in some way while fully understanding that it’s impossible.

And so, through the prism of what he knows — what he has heard from his grandmother, from his parents, from others — Sasha creates his own composite image of that time.

In popular imagination, the Soviet era is grey, drab, defined by an insistence on not standing out. Yet in Sasha’s collections there is sun and light, and fabrics that feel almost like colored candies. Sovietness here becomes something else entirely: a lightness.

— Because I’m looking at it through my own lens, fully aware of how much complexity there was.

What does the idea of Sovietness in fashion look like to you? Which of its key characteristics do you carry into your collections?

— It’s hard for me to put into words, even though I understand it very clearly. When I’m coming up with something, I immediately feel: Yes, that’s it! But if I try to articulate it… it’s certain kinds of prints, fabrics, color combinations, silhouettes.

Sasha points to Soviet pattern-making, where careful shaping through darts — fabric folds at the seams — allows a garment to follow the natural curvature of the body.

— There is even an element of romanticism in this attention to how the garment meets the body, fitted, composed, in harmony with it.

Moscow-born and based, Sasha has wanted to be a fashion designer since he was six. The certainty arrived sooner than he could have explained it. What was it about clothing that drew him in so early?

— I think it was my calling. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in clothes. I would flip through fashion magazines, and I was always curious about what my mother was wearing and why she had chosen it that way. When I got a bit older, she started asking my opinion, and we would go shopping together. I would tell her, Buy this — and this one better not.

Sasha took his vocation seriously and pursued formal fashion education. He admits that without it, there would be no Sasha Barbakov brand.

— I always say that the most important thing my education taught me is how to tell stories through clothing, how to weave meaning into collections.

— Before, I used to think: clothes are just clothes — what else could there be to them? Sure, I could have taught myself how to sew and picked up certain skills. But this kind of vision, this immense amount of work that happens long before you ever start sewing — I had no idea about any of that before studying.

— That’s what inspires me: telling stories through clothing. The theme of each collection always grows out of a specific story: my family, their lives. Like when I wanted to tell the story of my grandmother.

What kind of story was it?

— When I was little and came to visit her at the dacha, there were always pies with meat and potatoes, her signature pilaf, and everything smelled wonderful. There was always a plastic tablecloth on the table, and my grandmother hid money and important notes underneath it. What amazed me was that she always knew exactly where everything was. And those floral robes she wore.

There was a young woman, his age, a customer, who told Sasha that her own grandmother had the same kind of tulle curtains at her dacha — curtains he has made garments out of — and that it felt as though he had transported her back to that time. It was the best compliment he could receive, because it confirmed the task he had set for himself: to let clothing carry memory.

When does a garment become “alive” for you? And should clothing be alive at all?

— When there’s a story attached to it: you wanted it for a long time, dreamed about it, searched for it for ages, or someone gave it to you as a gift.

Sasha very often goes to second-hand shops. Finding something there that feels meant for you is, in his words, like winning the lottery. When you come across a piece that you like, that fits, and that’s in good condition, it immediately becomes special. That’s when you feel there’s a kind of connection between you and the garment.

Did it take you a long time to find your own voice — what makes the Sasha Barbakov brand recognizable?

— My graduation collection, Where is my homeland?, essentially marked the starting point of the brand. It became the ground from which everything grew. In it, I was thinking a lot about family, about searching for my roots, for a sense of home. These themes still matter to me today. For that collection, I worked extensively with lace, which went on to become characteristic of the brand.

— That collection was about my grandfather. Back then, in the Soviet era, almost everyone had lace doilies on top of their televisions, including him. Since I was taught that everything in a collection has to be justified, I decided to work with that motif. And I ended up loving it.

— Now I’m trying to remember what exactly hooked me so much… Probably the nature of the fabric itself: it’s never uniform, it always carries a specific pattern. I still try to reinterpret it each time, and not treat lace merely as a surface layer.

Today, when fashion has become both his profession and the structure of his days, it no longer belongs only to imagination, but to discipline too.

— Now it’s work, although it’s hard to call it “work” in the conventional sense. It’s not about clocking in from nine to five and then not thinking about it in the evening. I’m essentially engaged with it all the time: thinking, rethinking, even when I’m not physically working. My whole life is connected to fashion in one way or another.

— It’s a huge freedom to be at the head of your own brand — to do what you want and how you want it.

— And that’s very important to me. Working for other brands was both enriching and difficult, because my ideas weren’t always realized to their full extent. And for me, as a designer, that really matters.

When things aren’t going well, he reminds himself: “Sasha, this is your brand; you’re working for yourself.” In the daily routine, it’s easy to forget that, yes, he can absolutely do whatever he wants — release a collection or not release one.

— I think I often forget this because of the responsibility: first and foremost, responsibility to myself. Yes, it’s my brand, but I want it to grow, to become more recognizable. That means I have to play by certain rules.

— I did think about whether I should study PR or marketing, but for now I’m learning all of that organically on my own. I release what I genuinely like and then learn how to develop it further. And, you know, I often catch myself thinking I made the right decision.

Why? Because Sasha will always be a designer first. But at the moment, he’s doing everything himself. He’s making mistakes as he goes and learning from them.

Would you say that fashion is your life? Or is it still possible to draw a line?

— I wouldn’t want it to be that way — for fashion to be my entire life, with everything else secondary. There’s also family, hobbies, and other interests.

It is not a solitary enterprise. His wife is part of the work itself. Themes are discussed together; collections are edited in dialogue. She frequently takes on the most complex pieces; they still sew some of the garments themselves.

To remain connected to what he’s making, both as a designer and a person, Sasha needs immersion.

— I’m constantly afraid of things feeling superficial, so I’m always trying to get to the core — to go deeper, to do as much as I possibly can.

When he works with memory, he could invent anything — and no one would know. But he chooses not to. For one collection, he made a list of specific memories and worked only with those.

When you’re creating a collection, do you think more about the person who will wear it, or about the world it creates for them?

— From a business perspective, of course, it’s more important to think about the person who will wear the clothes — and I’m gradually coming to that myself. There is always an internal manager somewhere in the background. But to be honest, the world I create feels more important to me right now.

Immersion asks for quiet. But Moscow — oh, Moscow moves fast.

How does Moscow affect you as a creative person?

— Moscow always pushes you to do more, to work more. You’re constantly rushing somewhere. It’s a huge city. But since I’m a native Muscovite, I feel at ease in this rhythm.

Do you ever have an inner dialogue with the city?

— Very often. But a lot depends on the weather. When the sun comes out. When it’s neither too hot nor too cold.

— And then you step outside: the air feels just right. You can walk in a T-shirt or throw something light on. There’s a coffee in your hand, someone has wished you a good day, music in your headphones, cars passing by, and you just feel inseparable from it all.

Sasha is always chasing that inner sensation — the feeling that everything is in place, has come together — when he composes a look.

— Until I feel that inner certainty that we’ve done everything we can and the piece fits perfectly, it isn’t finished.

And how do you experience this state on a bodily level? Maybe a smile lands on your face?

— Usually it’s an exhale. I might laugh, or smile. There is relief in it, because it begins as a flat drawing, existing only in my head, and then I have to translate that flatness into volume. It is no easy task.

— You can be talented at imagining forms, but if you can’t realize them — choose the right material, the right fastening, construct the seams that create the intended volume — it simply won’t work.

His education also helps him manage the fear that returns each time he starts anew.

— Thanks to it, I understand what needs to be present for an initial idea to take hold. And once I start digging deeper, that’s when the fear thins out.

— And this is one of my favorite moments in working on a collection: when you’re still alone with it, before it enters the outside world.

Does the contemporary world inspire you? If so, in what way?

— Frankly, I’ve never really thought about whether it inspires me or not. Probably more no than yes. New fabrics, new technologies — that doesn’t interest me very much at the moment.

And people?

— People always inspire me. For example, I’ve long dreamed of finding a real large family for a future photoshoot — one with two or three generations.

Do you have a favorite family tradition?

— My parents divorced when I was five, so there weren’t as many family traditions as there might have been.

Every New Year’s Eve was spent at his grandmother’s dacha, usually with his father. A tall tree, a table set for a crowd, armfuls of guests arriving one after another — that was the tradition.

A beloved Soviet sweet?

— As a child, I loved a very simple treat: soft white bread with butter and sugar.

Some tastes — memories — never leave you. In different forms, they return and take shape.

A Ferrari on an icy, narrow cobbled road doesn’t even look like a Ferrari. It looks like a toddler on a rink, say, a second before their feet would go out from under them. An awkward moment. But somehow very touching too.

Eating an apple starts with an unconscious thought about how much I love apples, and how many of them — thousands? — I must have eaten up to now. Only then comes the first bite.

I don’t read magazines from cover to cover. A few pages. Still, I buy them.

I can see a soft amber light in a stranger’s window. I don’t know anything about what’s happening inside, and yet I feel soothed looking at it.

I have a shawl my mother bought for me before I moved abroad. We went to an art and crafts market together, and she said, Let me buy it for you so that it would remind you of me. Every time I wear the shawl — soft, warm, weightless — I think how my mother thought I would ever forget her.

I walked through Vondelpark the other day. It’s always packed. Suddenly a flashback: a late August evening, runners everywhere — sweaty backs, pumping legs — so many it felt suffocating, like being pressed inside a barrel of wriggling tadpoles.

“Are you high?” someone asked as I described the mellow feeling in my body. I wasn’t. I was coming down with the flu.

— Happy New Year!

I Happy New Year back. One of the owners asks if I’m going to stick with the same coffee in the new year, and I say why change the winning team. The cafe is warm, but I’m still bracing.

If taste is a way of seeing, what is the cost of discovering how the world gets seen, then?

January 3. A month-old burn on my left thigh has finally healed. The scab is gone, the new tissue feels soft. When I touch it I don’t feel the scarring, yet I see the mark left very well. Which is truer?

None, as it happens. They both exist.

January 4. Dry lips. Burning dry. I could even feel it in my sleep. Later in the day someone says what great lipgloss I have on. Lipgloss? Ah, I applied a spoonful of creamy honey and somehow totally forgot about it: the sweetness is intense only for a bit, but then you move on.

January 5. The blizzard is the talk of the town. And rightly so, in its early hours it did look like a fairy tale. But no one mentions that. It’s all about flights cancelled and public transport stalled.

Close to sunset, a patch of the sky had the appearance of pink cotton candy, and as long as I only looked at that one patch, it felt like summer to me.

January 7. Orthodox Christmas. A mandarin rind falls out from the pages of an Apartamento issue I pick up from my table. I used it as a bookmark minutes before the year turned.

I used to love mandarins not for themselves but for the time they were available in. Those little fireworks of scent used to mean New Year’s to me when I was little. That, and thin slices of lemon coated with crystal sugar, on a festive saucer.

If taste is a way of seeing, what am I likely not to feel?

A Soviet child, his work draws on icon painting, Byzantine opulence, and the long tradition of Russian art.

When I first encountered his paintings, I couldn’t help but notice the clothing in them. It was unlike anything I’d seen before.

There, the border between figure and fabric — person and presence — begins to dissolve, until it no longer matters.

Two pairs of eyes look straight at me. Almond-shaped. Unblinking. They seem to belong to two young women, though the longer I look, the less certain I grow.

They stand close together, bodies overlapping, arms crossing in a way that makes it unclear where one ends and the other begins. One, in the front, wears a light, golden dress, pure, luminous; the other, nested right behind, is dressed in deep black, rich, opaque. Metamorphosis.

I keep looking. The background is a red I rarely see in life. Dense and theatrical, like a curtain or ritual backdrop. Scattered across it: white rabbits, frozen mid-motion. They feel folkloric. As if lifted from a half-remembered tale.

The dresses themselves, I can’t take my eyes off. The golden fabric looks almost metallic, divine and ceremonial; the black garment absorbs the light. A pattern of light braided roses runs, uninterrupted, across both chests, joining the two in fabric. The women don’t seem to be wearing the dresses so much as inhabiting them.

Are they even dresses? Or are they states of being?

For Andrey Remnev, there is no distinction.

In his paintings, fashion becomes a primary site where being makes itself visible.

Sometimes it feels as though your heroines aren’t wearing clothes — they live inside the colour of them. Why does clothing become the immediate space of action in your works, rather than an interior or a landscape?

— The thing is, clothing, in my understanding, is a kind of energy field. A fashion designer succeeds only when they correctly sense how forms should be arranged around a living human body. For me, this philosophy in many ways comes from Orthodox theology.

— I remember once, in Kyiv, seeing on the wall of St. Cyril’s Church an image of an angel rolling up the sky. That folding space struck me so deeply that I felt it physically — as if the whole world were a scroll. And clothing, in essence, is the same kind of scroll, forming around the energy generated by the living human body. It becomes a carrier of strength and beauty.

Would you say your works are about the inner life of a person?

— Yes, I suppose that’s true. I’m depicting an inner state — a deep, concentrated state of being.

Art historians describe this as attentiveness: a gaze held with such concentration that the image seems to look back from elsewhere.

And meaning settles in the gaze.

I look back into the almond-shaped eyes, and the longer I look, the less distance there is between us.

— That’s what I strive for: a benevolent silence, a sense of mystery. Until I’m satisfied with the gaze of the figure, I don’t stop. That’s usually what leads me to the result I’m after.

In Redhead, a woman wears a red blouse and a wide, bell-shaped skirt that expands into an entire townscape. But the skirt is not a garment. It’s a miniature world: stately houses in soft pastel colours with green roofs line a sloping street; crowds of people gather; men in white uniforms are conveyed in carriages; regal horses mid-gallop.

I feel the woman is less an individual and more an embodiment — of memory, land, labor, or collective life — carrying an entire social world within the architecture of her body and dress.

What was clothing like in your childhood, in your family?

— I paid attention to clothing almost against my will. So many years have passed, yet I still remember my early outfits. My first memory is a bib — an oilcloth one. My parents didn’t believe I could remember it, but I described it exactly.

— Any piece of clothing my mother bought, she’d buy on credit — on her tab at the store. Those days my parents lived on credit, they had to. I remember our trips to Soviet shops so clearly: she would choose something for herself and then for us — there were four children in the family. Buying clothes became a kind of ritual. Stores had very little; shortages were severe. That’s why clothing — and objects in general — were treated with such care.

— Usually we bought footwear — Romanian or Polish. It was considered very high-quality, and it really was. When you wore something new, people noticed. I even had Indian jeans with an elephant on them. That was always a source of pride — stepping outside dressed a little differently, or in something new.

Do you study fabrics and tailoring before you paint them?

— No. That actually triggers resistance in me. I follow an approach I’ve observed among fashion designers. A key reference for me was Wim Wenders’ Notebook on Cities and Clothes, about Yohji Yamamoto. You see how he shapes volume directly on the body, pinning things here and there; how form emerges through movement.

— I myself never had the desire to work in fashion. When this aspect of my work became more pronounced, I often heard — from viewers and even other artists — that I “should go into fashion.” But I’m not interested.

Andrey Remnev didn’t go into fashion.

Fashion came to him.

Your paintings have a striking sense of tactility. The textiles feel almost touchable. How did that develop?

— I wanted to captivate the viewer. Around the time I was preparing solo exhibitions in the Netherlands, and knowing the tradition of Dutch art — which had a strong influence on 18th-century Russian art — I began to think seriously about the material depiction of drapery and fabrics.

— Around the same time, impressions from a monumental Coco Chanel exhibition at the Pushkin Museum resurfaced. Only later did I realize that this exhibition had planted a seed in me — one that unexpectedly began to grow when I started searching for a new artistic language.

— I remembered her Byzantine-inspired collection: garments made from heavy fabrics woven with gold thread. They were astonishingly beautiful. And I caught myself thinking how wonderful it would be to convey that form in painting — that effect of dimensional, gold-woven thread.

— In my work, it isn’t about imitation — not about meticulously rendering every thread. I was looking for an artistic equivalent: a gesture, a movement of the brush. That’s how my paintings gradually became filled with this new substance, a kind of Byzantine opulence rather than a smooth satin surface: ornament that holds the form together while adding another layer of meaning.

And then something unplanned happened.

After multiple collaborations with fashion brands, has your perception of fashion changed? And in your view, can fashion be considered an art form?

— Of course. It’s an extraordinary form of art.

— Once I traveled to Paris with my daughter — she had just finished first grade, she was eight. I had several meetings scheduled with a gallery interested in working with me. We stayed on Rue Saint-Honoré, parallel to Rivoli, right in the center.

— We were walking back to the hotel from the Louvre, and suddenly it was impossible to reach our street: everything was blocked off. Nearby is the ancient church of Saint-Roch. We made our way to the hotel by side streets, and when I went upstairs and opened the window, I saw the large square below, the steps of the church, and the cathedral windows from which organ music was pouring out.

— I realized that a farewell ceremony for a major figure must be taking place. There was press, an honour guard. That evening I called Moscow to ask what was happening in Paris. They told me: “Yves Saint Laurent has died.” I had seen his coffin being carried out. For me it was a kind of sign — that by chance I had witnessed the passing of a legend.

— And just two years later I drove to Paris from Moscow — it was 2010 — and there was an exhibition at the Grand Palais of Yves Saint Laurent’s collections. We went as a whole family. That exhibition marked me deeply.

— Looking at Saint Laurent’s work, it became obvious to me that one of the essential elements of art is a sense of measure. That was a powerful sign for me, an inner confirmation. I hadn’t planned anything, hadn’t even thought about it. And yet fashion reached me in this quiet, unforeseen way.

About five years later, the phone rang and someone started speaking rapidly in Spanish. It turned out to be a call from Madrid-based luxury brand Delpozo.

— They told me Delpozo’s then creative director Josep Font was inspired by my works and that they were preparing a show. They asked whether I would give permission for my paintings to be used as the backdrop for the runway.

— That’s how our communication began. In time, I ended up corresponding directly with Josep Font himself.

When the collection was presented on the runway, it was covered by The New York Times and many fashion magazines.

— In the opening lines they said that the collection was inspired by my works, along with Australian artist Rhys Lee’s. I think it was important for me to feel that what I do — what I think about, what comes from under my brush — is interesting to professionals of such a high level. That meant a great deal.

— Without question, I began paying much closer attention to the fashion world and seeing more clearly the currents designers live by.

A revelatory insight about creative pressure — in fashion and beyond — came to Remnev from the same film about Yohji Yamamoto, who says: “Every year they expect that I won’t come up with anything, that I’ll start repeating myself, that they’ll say Yamamoto has run out of steam…”

— And it struck me: painters experience exactly the same thing. The moment you allow yourself the slightest slack, or fall out of the expected rhythm, the “well-wishers” will immediately say you’re standing still.

— But painters have it a little easier — you can withdraw into solitude, and people will understand. A fashion designer doesn’t have that option. They must release something new several times a year. There is no room for silence. They can never stop working.

A young woman in a robe the colour of fertile earth has a devotional stillness. She could be a face from religious Orthodox imagery. Her gaze is direct; I catch her in a mirror. Who is looking at whom? Pagodas are woven into her garment, and her matching headpiece bears the delicate outlines of a bird and pale blossoms. She holds her hand to the chest — a reflexive intimate motion. Terra Incognita. The land of Self.

How did you come to icon painting?

— I came to it at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing and communist ideology disappearing along with it. There was a kind of vacuum, an emptiness in the collective consciousness. And the first thing that came to mind — though not immediately, as my whole life had been leading me there — was a desire to read spiritual literature. I was in my early twenties then.

— Like many people with no prior experience, I first turned to Eastern religions. I got hold of some Indian texts translated into Russian. But somehow they didn’t resonate with me at all. And then, by simple practical logic, I thought: why look far away when Orthodoxy is right here?

— And that’s how I discovered it for myself. And it felt as if a vast depth opened before me. Because all of this is connected with extraordinary achievements in the visual arts. The art of the icon — church art — possesses an astonishing perfection of form, without the emotional charge we associate with, say, Beethoven or Tchaikovsky. And that absence of overt emotion felt very close to me. All those passions, that intensity — they simply aren’t there.

This perfection of form drew Remnev deeper into that tradition — one that is as much an emotional state as it is a technical discipline.

— You enter a measured, methodically structured process that requires inner quiet. I’m not painting an icon — I’m creating my own image, something entirely different — but the technique demands a very clear, precise attitude toward every step.

— Any negligence — something we’re often prone to in secular painting, where everything begins with passion and emotion, that trembling excitement before a blank canvas — is impossible in the icon-painting tradition. There, the creative process requires silence.

How close do you feel to your characters, and what meanings do you hold through them?

— It’s hard to say. Apparently it’s something that lives in the soul. Many people spend their whole lives trying to understand themselves. And perhaps when I paint, it’s one of the ways I try to understand myself. In the process, certain aspects of my inner world reveal themselves — and sometimes I even start to respect myself.

Do you ever find yourself judging people by their clothes in real life?

— Those days are long gone. When I was in school — I had just finished the tenth grade and had started going to Moscow — I remember suddenly realizing that I reacted to every young person wearing jeans. And back then there weren’t many, especially branded ones. For some reason I assumed all of them were students at the prestigious Moscow State University. It’s funny to think about now.

Or another example. Remnev’s favorite photographer is Henri Cartier-Bresson; he loves looking through his albums. In one of them there’s a close portrait of an old man wearing a hat, a little scarf…

— And I always thought, “Wow, what elegance.” But when you look closely, you see a patched spot here, something sewn on there, and you realize he’s dressed in old, worn-out clothes. And still he looks like a dandy.

— Of course, I’m a product of the Soviet past, and this idea of “branded clothing” is still somewhere inside me. I remember once buying a jacket and coming in to work to teach in it. A friend and colleague of mine — my age — comes up and says, with complete sincerity, no irony at all: “Oh! Branded!” Then he adds, “I wear one like that when I do welding.”

— Yes… that feeling of a sturdy, well-made item — nothing flashy, but high-quality and with a bit of mystery — stays with you for life if you grew up in the Soviet Union.

— But the most important thing, in my view, is how a person wears their clothes. Clothing can be simple — even inexpensive — but if it’s chosen with taste, that’s what matters.

As a man, how do you understand a dress? What is it for you: form, symbol, or character?

— Character, I suppose. Although no — all of it is there together. But first of all, when I meet a woman and look at what she’s wearing, I see character. I start to feel and understand the person — why she dressed this way — and immediately some kind of response appears.

Is presence something you wear? Andrey Remnev and his paintings show me so beautifully: yes, it is.

Thank you for reading PEAR NOT BEAR this year. Spasibo! I’m so grateful for your time and attention. Wishing you rest, warmth, and mysterious beauty as the year turns.

P.S. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider liking, forwarding, or sharing it to help it find more readers like you.

Share

She was stunned to learn her work is being studied in design schools as a contemporary expression of Russian cultural identity.

— I still see myself as that same small person from Murmansk—just walking my path, still needing support, still hoping for a kind word.

It was a moment that reached deep. The girl from a port city above the Arctic Circle who once sat quietly at her mother’s sewing machine was now shaping the language of a new generation.

If, 50 years from now, your work were looked at as a cultural phenomenon, what meaning would you want people to find in it?

— Connection between generations. If my vision could serve as a bridge inspiring younger people to have a closer look at Elets lace, to wander museums, to rediscover what came before, then I can really say I’ve accomplished something lasting.

Fashion design is what Alexandra has always been doing — was born to do — but recognition, the sweeping kind with spotlights and applause, came into her life only a few years back.

How did your parents react to your dream of becoming a fashion designer?

— They only talked to me about it once. They suggested I try to apply to the geology faculty. They thought that, with so many lakes and rivers around Murmansk, I’d definitely find a job with the degree. (Oh, someone’s knocking... it’s my cat!)

Alexandra took their advice seriously: she took the entrance exams, but her scores weren’t quite enough for the program she wanted. So, calmly, she applied to a vocational school instead. The admissions staff were surprised: why choose a trade school when you could go to university? But for Alexandra, it was a completely conscious decision.

— My mother is a garment technician, and as a child I would always pester her, please teach me how to sew. She used to brush me off, saying she wasn’t good at teaching, that I should learn properly, in a specialized school, if I wanted to. So I made it my plan. In the end, my parents only tried to talk me out of it that one time.

Big dreams grow slow, that’s a fact. They also take no small amount of elbow grease, that’s another fact. Alexandra dreamt of studying at London’s Saint Martins since she was 16. She got there — at 31.

Her firstborn had just turned one when Alexandra left for London. She intended to stay the full three years — but the separation proved to be a tall task. She’d see a baby on the street and break into tears. So instead, she took a few intensive courses, and between classes immersed herself in all those museums. It all felt very rich, very alive.

Have you ever had to fight with yourself for your dream?

— In a way, I was lucky. I knew from a very young age that I was a creative person. And it wasn’t just about sewing clothes. Before that, there was macramé, floristry, drawing. Even if I only skimmed the surface, it all felt completely natural. I went through the motions of preparing for those entrance exams, but deep down, what I really wanted was to learn how to sew. Which is why I wouldn’t call it an inner struggle — more like moments of doubt.

And whenever those moments came — when she felt stuck or unsure — studying was the answer.

The experience in London was one such push forward.

It was 2012.

— The teachers — all established designers, either running their own brands or working for major fashion houses — gave me so much encouragement and invaluable feedback. I remember one of them waving my thick folder of sketches in front of the class and exclaiming: “This is how much you need to draw just to find 10 that really work.” I was blushing like crazy.

Hard to believe that was exactly when Alexandra found herself full of doubt, thinking she wasn’t smart enough, not educated enough, just spinning in circles, making nonsense.

— And there I was, in another country, with my broken English — what an adventure! — and getting praise like that. I’m very proud that my English didn’t stop me back then, even though it easily could have. With a dictionary in hand — this was before iPhones, or just as they were starting — and one Russian classmate to help me, I figured things out.

Her signature touches — the ruffles and the volumes — started to emerge around that time too.

— In London I went through a pure creative process, a rebirth. I arrived there completely emptied out, ready to start fresh. The way they taught us seemed difficult at first. In Russian education, there’s a system: you’re given rules, you follow them, you gain a solid skill set — a proper foundation.

— But there it was the opposite. You’d ask a question, and the teacher would never answer in any way that could impose their own opinion, they pushed you to find the answer within yourself.

Instead, they’d say, go to the library and look for something that had nothing to do with fashion. Anything could serve as inspiration, as long as it wasn’t clothing. And so she went and searched: for form, for texture, for colour, for the woman of her dreams.

— And through that process it became clear to me: I love large sculptural shapes, motion, asymmetry.

— And the ruffles, their eternal femininity. In Murmansk, it was impossible to walk around in dresses. The down jacket and warm pants were basically the only uniform. So my ruffles and volumes, I think, are my fantasies about summer; about spring; about a beautiful golden autumn.

A native of Murmansk, she is forever enchanted with her city. It’s grey, cold, even a little brutal. But its people are kind and warm.

And the nature there — that’s a whole other thing. It’s harsh, almost masculine, yet there is something magical and mysterious about it. Autumn lasts barely a week. A gust of wind, and it’s over. And the snow in Murmansk! It’s like something out of a fairy tale — The Little Silver Hoof, perhaps — thick flakes falling in the frost, everything creaking underfoot.

— If you record a voice message while walking, you can actually hear that crunch in the background.

It’s always cold there. It feels even colder because of the humidity. And the wind, it carries tiny shards of ice!

— It might sound gloomy, but as a child it never felt that way to me; everything seemed vast and full of magic. We northerners might seem stern or unsmiling at first, but our actions tell a different story.

She needed to move, though: her husband worked and lived in Moscow, and things were starting to pick up for her there too.

— I had such an intense longing for Murmansk, I didn’t understand how to be in Moscow, what to do here. It was hard. But those 3 years of going back and forth helped me prepare emotionally. When it finally struck me that I couldn’t just leave Moscow — the projects, the momentum — I brought my children here. And that was it.

While working to define her brand’s DNA, the move made it very clear what she wanted to express, what really mattered. These days, Alexandra’s creativity is often sparked by that — or perhaps by what she hasn’t quite dared to say out loud. It all comes through in her collections; they’ve become her own language for communicating with the world.

— Everything between me and Murmansk has always been about love. I am what I am because of it. And through my collections, I now celebrate its nature, its climate, and the people I’ve met there. Including myself.

How do you enter that state where something new and truly your own can be created?

— Imagine this: I’m a mother of four (plus the cat) with endless household tasks and work processes happening all at once. It’s constant noise. One foot is answering emails, the other is stirring borscht. There’s often chaos.

— But all it takes is a short walk to shift my perspective. For me, the impulse to create grows right out of that — out of the messiness, the motion, the rhythm of everyday life.

— The strength and the weakness of creativity? The first is about the absence of boundaries, the only limits are the ones you set for yourself; in essence, there are none. And its weakness is reflection. Too much overthinking, doubting, worrying can — and will — stop you.

What sparks your curiosity in life?

— A quote, an opinion, a book, anything really, even something I don’t fully understand yet. I’m the kind of person who gets easily intrigued, who loves learning and still has that childlike sense of wonder when something new truly grabs you. There’s that adventurer in me; I like diving into new experiences.

The last time you felt that kind of pure, unfiltered excitement — what was it about?

— Oh, life in Moscow keeps surprising me with moments of recognition and rewards. For example, earlier this year someone from the RBC TV [Russian Business Channel] called: “Alexandra, congratulations, you’ve been named an RBC Visionary.” I happened to be at the airport at that moment, with a friend. I was over the moon, laughing, smiling, so thrilled.

Did GAPANOVICH the brand already exist before London?

— Not really, back then those kinds of ideas weren’t in my mind. I simply saw myself as a designer. In Russia at the time, there was no real concept of a “brand” or “DNA.” Remember what fashion was like in the 2000s? Every self-respecting wife of a wealthy man suddenly became a “fashion designer”, that was the trend. Actual designers could be counted on one hand — Zaitsev, Yudashkin… And if you weren’t in Moscow, breaking through was almost impossible.

In those times, earning a living as a designer often meant sewing for private clients. Alexandra had her own little atelier in Murmansk, where she worked with custom orders. It was the only way to earn money for her collections.

— Luckily I didn’t have too many difficult clients. In general, such people rarely cross my path, but when they do, they make up for all the quiet years at once.

— One experience still stands out — I was pregnant with twins at the time. A woman came in, and I think from the very get-go she had some kind of plan to take advantage of me.

The woman claimed she’d never had anything custom-made before, but left with a full styling consultation — where to buy shoes, what bag, which earrings, even how to present the look. Eventually she caused a scene — shouting, using slurs — even though Alexandra was visibly pregnant.

— I ended up just giving her the finished dress for free. And I’m sure she wore it to her event.

In her heart of hearts, Alexandra thought: “Enough! I want to sell only my own designs!”

The wish was granted.

But not without one more hurdle.

A serious illness became a catalyst for growth. Unsure how much time she had, Alexandra shifted into high gear. Today, seven years in remission, she credits recovery to deep inner work.

— It was a similar push I must have needed — like the moment with the dress. During my post-surgery recovery I thought: time is uncertain; I need to do everything I can, as soon as I can.

True to her nature, she soon turned to learning and enrolled into a fashion programme in Moscow to study brand DNA and marketing. Having entered her graduation collection into Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Russia, she was awarded a grant. It was presented at the Museum of Moscow as the first collection of Alexandra Gapanovich, the brand.

It was 2021.

From that moment on, there were no more pauses — no hesitation, no reservations.

— I’m so proud I never stepped off my path and kept moving, steadily. I used to think I wasn’t a systematic person, but it turns out I am, and very much so. Good things don’t grow fast; I learned that firsthand. The fundamental layers take time — a long time. And all those difficult years? None of it was wasted. I’m incredibly fortunate — and I worked incredibly hard. There’s still so much I want to learn and do; I only hope I have the time.

Is there anything that surprised you most about your profession?

— Honestly, everything. Imagine spending years, decades tucked away in your own little world, with no real support (apart from family, of course), and then — in midlife — finding yourself in Moscow, finding success. It’s that childlike excitement again!

— And I’m still such a rookie!

By nature, Alexandra is a bit of a loner. But as a Gemini, she says she can switch, become outgoing, meet people — and in the moment she enjoys it.

— It’s uplifting. When you see people coming to you with enthusiastic eyes, hugging you, thanking you — how could you possibly resist that?

— But honestly, it’s still not easy for me. In those moments I give away a lot of energy, and I don’t really know how to take it back. I often feel so drained afterwards. I learnt that about myself once I started being in the public eye. It’s stressful for me, so I tend to avoid it when I can. And to recover afterwards… I clean.

She laughs when she says that. And for the first time I notice Alexandra wears white mascara — the tips of her eyelashes look like there are snowflakes on them.

For years Alexandra’s believed in doing what she loves and along the way, shaping the audience’s eye. Defining taste rather than following it. Being misunderstood didn’t scare her before. But now, with real eyes on her, it suddenly did. And she first noticed it while working on her collection “Eudialyte”, released earlier this year.

— When we were shooting the campaign, I looked at the pieces and thought, they’re so involved… will people understand them? What if they won’t? It was the first time I’d ever asked myself those questions.

—Then, after the show, another thought appeared: can I ever do something even better?

What made “Eudialyte” such a challenging one?

— The colour; the form. There are so many complex combinations and details. But I simply couldn’t have made it any other way. I’m deeply proud of that collection. It’s my strongest, most personal work.

It was inspired by Alexandra’s hiking trips with her father. He gave her his love for minerals; he let her read his books on them. He wasn’t a geologist — it was all amateur passion, but genuine passion. His whole generation was like that: guitars, campfires, tents. She grew up around that. It shaped her.

Eudialyte comes in reddish pink to wine-red, sometimes with magenta or brownish tones. It often forms juicy-looking patches inside lighter host rocks. Russia’s Kola Peninsula — a fantastical place: a home to stones of unimaginable shapes; jagged cliffs; waterfalls and bays; tundra; cold ocean caves; and thousands of lakes — is where Alexandra and her father would have come across it.

— I love minerals to the point of obsession. When I look at them, I fall into a meditative state. My mind stops thinking; it just marvels.

Speaking about meditative states: she considers cleaning one of them. Especially when there’s still a way to go before a vacation or time off. And we aren’t talking about a quick tidy-up — it can take her an entire month. A real, proper sort-out: threads by colour, beads by shape…

— It’s a kind of meditation for me. Traditional meditation, on the other hand, I can’t stand. The idea of sitting still and “calming the mind” drives me crazy. For me, meditation happens when I’m working with my hands — doing something repetitive, like knitting, embroidering, or sewing.

— When I’m sewing, I can sit for hours. Some people think that’s a nightmare, but for me, it’s perfect. That’s my kind of peace.

Still, why fashion and not something else?

— Mostly circumstances. Growing up in the late Soviet and post-Soviet 80s and 90s, those were difficult times; the selection in stores was... let’s say, very limited, almost nonexistent. And I’ve always been petite, so finding clothes that fit me was nearly impossible.

— I started making clothes for myself when I was young. Wherever I went in something I’d made, people would go, “Oh, where did you get that?” and then they’d ask me to make something for them too. I never advertised — it all just happened naturally.

Of all Alexandra’s designs, it’s her dresses that attract the most attention — her best-sellers, complex and one-of-a-kind. Rightfully so: there is a lot of handwork in them — intricate finishes, fabric distress, dyeing techniques. Not to mention the sculptural form, and the ruffles.

Do you ever have days when you think, “Today I’m not a designer at all”?

— I sure do! Especially when I’m tired or haven’t slept. That inner critic immediately shows up: “Really? You call yourself a designer?"

— “Dior was a designer — but you? What are you even trying to do?” Yes, it happens quite often. And sometimes I just want to be a mom and not do anything work-related for a day.

And solitude, that’s essential too.

— I had design in my life first and a family later, so those quiet moments have become rare, and I really cherish them. I just enjoy being alone. It’s something both a mother of several children and a creative person can understand — that need to be alone with your thoughts. I’m always thinking about something, but when no one’s around to interrupt, that’s my favourite state to be in.

She usually catches those moments in a cafe over lingonberry tea or caramel latte, right after she drops off her children at school or kindergarten.

— It’s become a little ritual of mine. Without it the day just doesn’t feel quite right.

At 45, Alexandra is finally learning to delegate — and to sleep through the night.

— It took complete exhaustion for me to realise I had to let go. It felt like I hadn’t slept in 25 years. I drove myself into a serious burnout. I couldn’t understand how it was possible to hand things over to someone else, to trust another person with something I’d always done myself. Yes, I had issues with trust. Now I have no idea how I ever managed to do everything alone. Honestly — how?!

With a psychologist’s help, she has allowed herself, reluctantly at first, to slow down and to discover in the process that there’s nothing wrong with just sitting on the couch — and, most importantly, not feeling that pulsing nagging sense of guilt about it.

— I’ve been focusing a lot on personal growth, on understanding myself more deeply. Why am I such a workaholic?

— Fashion design is, of course, at the centre of my life; it’s something I simply can’t imagine my life without. Yet there are still many day-to-day work things I need to step back from. There are people on my team now who are just as dedicated and passionate — and in many ways, they do certain things better than I can.

Some roots you don’t want to sever — and some you just can’t.

Why is it important for you that your pattern makers stay in Murmansk?

— It’s not really about them staying in Murmansk. It’s just that I’ve been working with this woman for over 15 years. Unlike me, she’s not someone who likes to move; she wouldn’t go to Moscow. I kept my atelier there; I still rent the space, and she works there with all the equipment. I trust her completely.

— I can’t imagine abandoning someone who’s been by my side for so long. She knows exactly what I want, understands my way of thinking, and often suggests smart, constructive solutions. We’re a real team, there’s complete trust between us. I’m very loyal that way. Distance isn’t a problem for me.

Right now Alexandra works only with what she’s lived — not with theories or abstractions, but real experience: what she’s witnessed in her own life, her family’s, her friends’.

— My childhood left me with the warmest memories — the smell of hay; picking berries and mushrooms; fishing; the countryside; the tablecloths and embroidered napkins. All of that became deeply embedded into my aesthetic.

— I wore second-hand clothes back then, and now I love giving my designs a slightly worn look, making them feel as if they already have a story, a life of their own. That sense of continuity runs through my work. My past connects to my present and to my future.

And the future lies in technology, something Alexandra wants to master so she can speak the same language as the new generation.

— We’ve already started experimenting — we made short videos with elements of AI. I show them to my kids and they say, “Cool.” There’s a new generation growing up behind us, and if we don’t create a space to preserve what was once precious to us, it might simply fade.

Let’s imagine your collections had a scent, what would it be?

— Mandarins. The scent of cold, of New Year’s, of memory. “Eudialyte” would be different — raw stone, damp earth, tundra. But overall? Always citrus. Always mandarins.

Besides her own memories and impressions, Alexandra also wants to interpret the traditions of the Far North.

— Lately I’ve been thinking seriously about visiting and speaking with the guardians of local minority traditions, for example, those who preserve Nenets or Sámi embroidery. I want to digitize and document the heritage — to create a research-based project before it disappears.

Alexandra is not a fan of straightforward, literal approaches. She says it worries her when designers simply turn to ornaments or embroidery for a contemporary “ethnic” look.

— I’m more interested in finding meaning through form, through cut, through the treatment of fabric.

— I can’t just take a Sámi motif of dancing figures and stitch it onto a dress — that’s a dangerous line where design turns into souvenir-making. First, I need to understand how to reinterpret it. Maybe to make the pattern abstract, but then, if I do, would the communities it belongs to feel offended, thinking I’m playing with their heritage?

Right now, the keepers of these traditions in the Far North still sew the way they did a hundred years ago. But will it speak to younger generations? For their heritage to continue, they’ll need to open up to that space where tradition meets contemporary fashion.

— You have to ask permission. You have to start a dialogue. My goal is to modernize tradition — to use new technologies like 3D, volume, appliqué — but to do it delicately, with respect. It’s a complex subject, which is why I haven’t touched it yet. But the thought is there. And it stays with me.

What does Russian style mean to you?

— It’s about a certain kind of femininity: dresses, restraint, softness, inner strength. An intellectual beauty. Of course, there are iconic pieces — the sarafan, for example — but they exist in other cultures too, so we can’t claim them as purely ours.

— I’d love for Russian women to be associated with taste, the way Parisian women are. But we live in a reality where, for most people, style simply isn’t a priority. We’re constantly in survival mode, and in those conditions, clothing must serve its purpose first.

— How do I define taste for myself? I think taste is when you look at someone and immediately sense there’s something unique about them, something truly their own. In the ideal sense, taste is an inner state — a feeling of one’s soul, of self, of how you move through the world.

Alexandra believes a lot of it comes from family.

— In general, interest in appearance begins at home. If your mother or grandmother didn’t have a sense of taste — if there wasn’t that visual culture around you — then there’s not much for it to grow from, unless you’re a natural exception who starts exploring it on your own. Of course, you can learn taste, but the instinct for it is often inherited.

As a child, Alexandra stole her brothers’ sportswear — and she never stopped. Today she still prefers oversized silhouettes: XXXL on her XS frame.

— I don’t like tight clothes. Volume feels like home — it’s that shy sparrow inside me wanting to hide. But I always dress with respect for the occasion. My mother taught me that. She used to say you can’t show up to someone’s birthday looking “whatever”, it shows how you feel about that person.

An unexpected place or thing that has inspired your design work?

— Once I was in this group of people, and I found myself so inspired by one person there, their appearance, their thoughts, the way they carried themselves. I suddenly started imagining what kind of pieces I would design for them. It really surprised me that inspiration can come not only from travel, culture or landscapes, but from peers. Some are so fascinating that you just want to capture them, their energy, their mood.

How would you define imagination? And when, for you, are thinking and imagination opposites, and when are they interchangeable?

— Let me try to unpack that. Imagination can be very vivid, while thought tends to be more material. In a way, imagination exists right on the threshold of thought.

— Something subtle, almost fleeting, passes through you; when you catch it, it turns into a thought that won’t let go. From there, it slowly becomes something real. So for me, the two are inseparable: the beginning of anything physical always starts in imagination.

But imagination can also stay where it is — if there’s no inner need to bring it into the world just yet.

— I sometimes feel like there’s a little shelf, or even a cabinet, in my mind where all those imaginings are stored, waiting for their moment.

Do you have a piece of clothing you’ve held onto for years, something you can’t let go of?

— An Orenburg shawl, a soft grey one made of down. My grandmother gave it to my mother, and my mother later passed it on to me. I used to wear it at home all the time, wrapped around my waist to keep warm — I’m always cold. At some point it was completely worn through.

— After my twins were born, I was probably reflecting on life a lot. For two months, I sat and stitched the holes closed.

Clothing, for Alexandra, is more than just fabric. It’s a connection to the past, a language of memory.

— I just couldn’t bring myself to throw it away.

Can you love the cold enough to build your world around it — in elaborate colourways, in sumptuous volume, in flowing feminine silhouettes? Alexandra did. She does.

And her path only keeps deepening.

And eventually, it led me to Alla Sergeyeva, a designer and maker from Irkutsk, Siberia — open skies; endless forests; the edge of Lake Baikal, where the wind has a name and the water remembers.

She didn’t plan a brand. But somewhere between late motherhood and early memory, one did take shape.

— Someone will hold one of my bags and think: “This was made by a person who truly cared.” And indeed, it was — by someone who wanted people to look at it and feel joy. That, for me, is success.

Alla gave the brand not just its shape, but its meaning, too. Literally.

— My girlfriends sent me one of those memes: “Find out your name in Japanese.” Most of the results were hilariously awkward — some even sounded inappropriate to Russian ears. But mine was different. My name, Alla, turned out to be sonota — not a phonetic match, but a translation of meaning.

In Greek, Alla means “different” or “other,” which in Japanese becomes sonota. It sounds gentle: easy on the ears, easy on the tongue. A decade later Alla stylised the word into Sonóta, and so it became the name of the brand.

— That perfectly reflects our spirit: a refusal to follow the expected path. I think that’s the challenge we all face as social beings: living in society built to impose rules and patterns, yet still remaining unique. I see differently, I think differently, and I don’t buy something just for the logo. All of it is now contained in the name — and it’s my own name, at that!

Convinced whole-heartedly that the emotions one puts into their work are passed on to the people who receive it, Alla strives to create an environment where her artisans — her craftswomen — feel safe, comfortable, and inspired. When something is made in harmony, it carries warmth and light within it.

The greatest compliment for Alla is when someone writes: “I don’t know why, but I keep reaching for your bag. I try others, but always come back to yours. I can’t explain it.”

— But I can. The bag carries the presence of the hands that made it. And because I’ve refined it anatomically — wearing it constantly, adjusting and perfecting the design until it feels just right.

All Sonóta bags are crafted from Alla’s own designs, in Italian leather, in a small but welcoming studio (where the craftswomen have practical workwear — branded aprons and T-shirts — plus tea, coffee, and everything else that makes the space cozy). At any given moment Alla is likely wearing one of her own samples. She lovingly calls them “Frankensteins”.

— Once, I came to Moscow with one of my “Frankenstein” bags. We were having dinner with my girlfriends — one has a suit brand, another does knitwear, and me with my bags. We were chatting, catching up, asking each other how things were going. Then: “Come on, show us your bag!”

— I felt a bit embarrassed — my bag had only one inside pocket, and even that was just stitched on. They started laughing. One of them opened her jacket and said, “Look, same story!” — a black blazer with white threads showing inside and rolled-up sleeves. The other friend laughed and said, “Wait till you see my skirt — it’s the same!” We laughed so hard.

What do you consider the most important thing you’ve done for yourself in life?

— My children! I used to think I’d live child-free like Maya Plisetskaya. But then life took a turn. Now I can’t imagine anything more important than my two sons.

— Just the other day my friend and I were talking about how spontaneous our lives used to be — flying to Europe on a whim, road-tripping from Prague to Munich. Then we laughed, wondering how we ever decided to have kids. But you look at your child and know you’d give your life for them without a second thought.

Did you or your family have to make any sacrifices to get Sonóta off the ground?

— No big sacrifices. My family always comes first. If I don’t make space for them I’d feel like I was missing something important, and that would eventually affect Sonóta too.

— For example, this whole past year, our entire family was basically in fifth grade: one of my sons changed schools, and the new program was very demanding, so we all studied with him to help him catch up.

If motherhood gave Alla a new sense of self, it is her childhood memory of her father that informed and lives on in Sonóta’s most recognisable piece: the Fisherman’s Bag.

The bag was named almost instantly.

— It just felt right: partly because of those warm memories of my father coming home from a day’s fishing, and partly because the first image I pinned to the moodboard was of the omul, the traditional Baikal fish that exists nowhere else in the world. My father is an avid fisherman; it’s a passion very natural to men here. And so the association came right away.

But the process, like every part of Sonóta, was anything but rushed. The idea had been circling for some time. Alla knew she wanted to create a crossbody — something soft but structured, large enough to hold a 13-inch laptop, and comfortable, naturally.

Out of her stacks of sketches, one design quietly emerged as the frontrunner.

Then came the knot.

Having sewn the first leather prototype, Alla discovered the strap wouldn’t stay fixed. It also had to be adjustable — everyone’s height is different.

— Then I thought, what if you could just tie it into a knot. But when I made the first version, it kept untying itself! I thought, “Well, that’s it. What have I done?” I sat there, twisting and retwisting, until I somehow landed on a four-loop knot — and it worked. It held. And it looked beautiful. I’m really proud of it!

When an accessories designer — brought in to help Alla distill her ideas for what would become Sonóta’s signature — saw the final result, she congratulated her and compared it to Loewe.

For someone self-taught, it was praise that stayed with her.

The Fisherman’s Bag was soon photographed at Lake Baikal — and these are the images that stayed with me, especially the one where the model sits on the pier, back to the camera, the bag slung over her shoulder, in the mysterious fog.

— We spent a long time searching for the right fog for that shoot. I called everyone I knew, asking where and when fog usually appears on Baikal. We drove around to every pier, asking, “When do you get fog here?”

— Finally, we found it — thick as milk, just hanging there. It was incredibly beautiful. We even climbed over a fence — some local had wrapped branches around the pier as if he’d claimed it for himself. While we were shooting, we kept thinking, “He’s going to show up any minute and catch us!” But in the end no one came. I guess at that early hour he was still asleep. We were there really early.

When you travel to Lake Baikal, tradition is very much alive. It’s customary to make an offering to the spirits so your journey goes smoothly. A kind of unity with nature, an act of reverence. A quiet shiver in the chest. A sense you’re approaching something powerful. Something primal.

On the road to Baikal, there are special spots — small clearings with sacred poles where people tie symbolic ribbons. And the local sailors have entire rituals they perform before going out to sea. Although Baikal is technically a lake, here it’s called the sea — it’s that vast. The wind can rise suddenly and with such force that you understand why these rituals are still held in deep respect.

What emotions or feelings do you want to express through your bags?

— Kindness.

How?

— It begins with caring, the foundation. When a person is kind to someone else, they pay attention; they care. For example, this pocket fits a passport perfectly, and this one is just right for a phone. The lines and curves of the bag are balanced; everything opens and closes comfortably. And people can feel that — they can feel that someone thought about their needs, cared for them. To me, that’s giving someone a small piece of kindness.

— Everything made for people should serve them, bring joy, and make life easier. A bag is meant to help you. Period.

At first Alla became deeply fascinated by the process itself — by hand stitching, by the tactile experience of making bags. Then it grew from there: she got into working with leather. She visited suppliers. Studied different leather types. Then even deeper: she learnt about adhesives, reinforcements, dyes, threads, lining materials, the works.

— It all evolved naturally, one stage leading to the next, and at some point, almost without my noticing, Sonóta came into being.

Alla’s tone shifts, as if she’s about to voice her most private, tender thought:

— And now I’ve devoted, quite literally, my whole life to it.

Not a widely known fact, but leather craftsmanship thrived in Alla’s native Irkutsk under the tsars. Hides were brought in from neighbouring Mongolia. They had tanning barrels, they soaked and stretched the leather — every stage of the process was done in workshops strewn about the city. After 1920, the Soviet government shut everything down. Industrialization began, and the craft was buried.

Sonóta isn’t chasing trends. Each release takes the time it needs.

— Of course I want to grow the brand. But it’s very important to me that it preserves its authenticity and remains small. I want every bag to carry a touch of handwork: a magnet stitched by hand, or, on our Fisherman’s Bag, the flap sewn with the saddle stitch. I want that artisanal element to remain in every piece.

— My background is in big manufacturing, and I know that once volumes increase, values shift. In fact, they don’t just shift — they get replaced. A mission turns into a marketing slogan, and everything else gets adjusted to fit it. That’s inevitable. And I don’t want to play that game anymore.

Baikal is a universe. There are quiet bays with swans, and groves where ancient oaks grow so thick you can’t wrap your arms around them. In winter, people ski its frozen surface; in summer, they sunbathe on its beaches until their skin turns bronze. It’s a place shaped by wind. Five winds: one dry, one violent, one cold, one warm, one moist.

Barguzin. Sarma. Verkhovik. Kultuk. Shelonnik. Names spoken like old legends.

In some places, methane bubbles rise beneath the ice, freezing in delicate clusters that twist and pattern the surface like blown glass.

Do you remember the first bag you ever made?

— It was a satchel like the one I used to carry to school; how we are all rooted in childhood! This one I sewed out of denim — I cut old jeans into little squares, added a zipper, and attached handles on both sides. I stitched it entirely by hand with the saddle stitch — aka French herringbone — I was learning at the time as a hobby, the same strong double-thread stitch Hermès uses in their pieces and which was traditionally used for saddlery.

— My kids still carry it around!

That’s great quality then — both the stitching and the denim itself.

— Yes! I never throw away old jeans — not mine, nor my husband’s or kids’. Every time I fold a pair, I wonder, What am I going to do with all these? But the Plyushkin in me [Gogol’s hoarding character in Dead Souls] keeps saving them.

— Back in the day, all my jeans were skinny, the kind that took 15 minutes to squeeze into, only while holding your breath. Now? Comfort first: oversized, belted — and perfect.

A rethinking of values!

— Yes, we’ve really shifted toward comfort and ease. I just don’t want to constrain myself anymore — what for? I used to wear stilettos, and oh my God, the roads! The heel would get stuck somewhere, and good luck pulling it out! Now it’s sneakers or comfy slides. And fashion actually reflects that — or maybe it even dictates it? Feminine silhouettes are coming back, but they’re not as restrictive as they used to be; now they let you breathe. I had blazers so tight I couldn’t even bend my arms at the elbows!

Alla first fell down the rabbit hole of leatherwork out of sheer curiosity — and she still calls curiosity her greatest asset.

She learned from everything she could find: YouTube tutorials, online articles, old books on traditional leather craft. She learned a lot from leather suppliers too — how they treat and finish hides, how embossing is done. She reached out to many Russian artisans, writing and calling them with questions. She watched live streams from international bag makers who shared their process in real time — she’d record everything on her phone, take notes, and study each step later. She attended Hermès masterclasses they used to hold in Moscow.

She approached tools with the same curiosity — wanting to understand everything about them and the artisans who make them.

— At one point, I reached out to a toolmaker in Korea, and we had such a funny little exchange. I wrote to him in English, ending my message with, “Awaiting your reply with impatience,” which is how you politely say it in Russian. He replied, “Don’t be afraid of your impatience — I’ll make everything according to your request.” One of those lost-in-translation moments, but so funny!

We both laugh, and then I ask if she sees herself more as a designer or an artisan. Without hesitation, Alla says she’s a maker, first and foremost.

— There’s a special warmth in knowing the traditions our ancestors hoped to pass down are still alive — and that I get to carry them forward.

Do you have any bags that were passed down from your mother or grandmother?

— No, sadly I don’t, and I regret that deeply. My grandmother once had a small beaded handbag I often think about. I wish it had found its way to me. It was green, with a bronze clasp, and a red flower — or perhaps a tiny berry — in the centre, all made of beads. My grandmother was such a woman of style. She had a velvet coat, a collection of hats, and often wore red lipstick.

The first Sonóta bag was named after Alla’s grandmother Nina. Then came a whole collection shaped by Baikal’s water and wind.

Unmistakenly Alla’s roots are her inspiration. But inspiration itself doesn’t always lift her. She says it works the other way around for her: she keeps working and working, and when nothing seems to come together, she sinks into an emotional low.

— But I’ve noticed something about myself: just when I reach that point — snap! — an idea appears. I sketch something out, start experimenting, and the process begins to flow. At first everything feels like a struggle — and then, pop! — something takes shape.

— I seem to need a kind of crisis at the start. I tried other ways — meditation, for instance — because my process didn’t feel entirely healthy. But then I realized: everyone has their own way. And for me, this is just how it works. So be it.

Baikal’s water is so clear you can see all the way to the bottom. And it’s slightly sweet. And when you dip your hands into it, it’s like something out of a Marvel movie: the charge runs right through you.

Irkutsk lies nearest to here. A city on Buryat land. A place the Decembrists made their home in exile. A blend of Siberian spirit, aristocratic refinement, and quiet inner dignity.

There is a local flute-like instrument that sounds like reeds rustling in the wind. Not soft, not tonal. The limbe.

“They really do smell wonderful,” said one Moscow journalist on a podcast where Alla was a guest. He was talking about Sonóta bags. The beautiful scent comes from the slow, layered process of vegetable tanning, the hallmark of good leather. Alla says she can always recognize that note in perfumes — warm leather, slightly tobacco-like (but not smoky!), softened by a powdery hint and a trace of tonka bean.

Do you have a favorite book about design or fashion?

— I do. Most often I return to Beauty in Exile by [fashion historian] Alexandre Vassiliev. It’s a book about Russian émigrés, women particularly. There are so many fascinating stories: when the Revolution began, many aristocrats fled to Europe with almost nothing, believing they’d soon return to their former, bohemian lives. But that life never came back. So they started anew — they opened ateliers and couture houses, using their remarkable skills in sewing and embroidery. They even made lingerie, and their craftsmanship quickly attracted clients from royal families and high society across Europe.

What does beauty mean to you personally?

— It’s one of those indefinable concepts, like love, happiness, or truth. Everyone sees it differently. For me, beauty is harmony — not shock value. It’s something close to nature, something your eyes simply rest upon. You look at it and can’t look away. And it doesn’t have to be perfect, not in proportion, not in appearance.

— The colours should feel natural, the lines. Of course, nature teems with bursts of hues and shades, but it’s the harmonious combinations that truly resonate with us.

Both essential and meaningful is how Alla would like her bag to be in her customers’ lives. She doesn’t say “customers," though. Throughout our conversation she affectionately called them devchyonki — a Russian word for gals, but it carries more heart than that. It suggests closeness. A bond of sisters, as it were.

— I want the bag to last for years, to be passed down from mother to daughter. And when the daughter carries it, I want her to think of her mother.

Alla remembers herself as a shy girl, a straight-A student. But she can’t quite recall what she wanted to be back then.

— I was always sewing or making things with my hands. I used to make hair clips for my girlfriends. I even had a waitlist! They’d bring me beads from their mothers, and I’d create something out of them.

She went on to earn a degree in accounting with honours — a path that quickly led her into big business. But how did she choose it? She didn’t.

— My parents thought it would be the most practical choice. So I applied, without really understanding myself yet.

Whether or not she knew herself then, she became a force — headhunters still try to recruit her as a chief auditor and accountant. Some even refuse to hear that that ship has sailed.

What’s the one thing you won’t start your workday without?

— Coffee. That touch of bitterness, that aroma almost like velvet, that’s pure bliss.

What does luxury mean to you?

— Freedom to choose what you truly want. But first, it’s about understanding what you actually want, who you are, and what you’re about. Once you know that, you can choose things that speak with your heart and soul. Like choosing a bag not because everyone else wears it but because it reflects you. That kind of freedom, that’s the greatest luxury there is to me.

That, and the reverence for the craft, nature and the people. A different — sonota — breed of luxury.

Now when I see that photo again — the woman in the fog, the bag slung over the shoulder — I don’t just see an image. I see Alla: her hands, her story, her homeland. And I feel what she hoped I would feel.

Joy.

Subscribe now

Thank you for reading PEAR NOT BEAR. Spasibo!

Share

The other day, I recognised myself in the mirror. Not in the ordinary, passing way we all do, but so that it made me stop in my tracks. I hadn’t done anything unusual — I’d just stepped out of the shower, I was combing my hair. Then, in the tilt of my eyebrows, I could see the features of the girl from my childhood photographs. For years, decades, forever, I couldn’t see it. Not once. And then, without warning, there she — I — was. Has that ever happened to you?

The moment was soothing. Like warm sunlight on your face. Unusual, too — as if you realised it wasn't sunlight at all, but a gossamer spider web on its odyssey through air. It felt as though time folded in on itself, and the distance between that girl and me collapsed into something whole. Have I come home?

Another encounter: I threw my linen blazer over the back of a chair when I got home one evening. When I picked it up later to hang it, the fabric yielded in my hands. It was smooth, familiar, almost intimate. I was overcome with tenderness, as if I were tidying up after a lover I hadn’t seen in a while.

Moments like this make me wonder what, exactly, it means to recognise oneself — and whether recognition lives in memory, in sensation, or in something deeper. We speak of ourselves as if we’re continuous. Impossible, really. At the cellular level I’ve been remade countless times.

Perhaps identity is a series of selves stitched like a quilt (for comfort) or a necklace (for embellishment). Fragments of every version of me, pieced together. Or select beads, polished and strung. What I hold in private vs what I choose for display. Maybe happiness is where the gap between the two is almost none.

Why now? Or, why not sooner? (Hey, glaciers move too!) Perhaps the answer is less about the face itself, and more about the eyes that are looking. Recognition doesn’t arrive because the features finally line up like tracing paper, but because the eyes themselves are willing to see. And they are.

Who was it in the mirror: the girl I was, or the woman she became? I won’t deny the inevitability of the passage: wasn’t she — I — meant to arrive here anyway? The only question is when and how.

It took a divorce — and later, a rupture the whole world felt — to make me begin, gingerly at first, to look my way.

Our last breakfast together was at a hotel buffet. I had to be at work by 8 a.m., but at 7:30 we were still asking the waiter for a second coffee. I picked up my phone to call in late. “How late?” “I don’t know…”

I wanted that buffet to never close. I wanted to keep circling back for another slice of cheese, another danish, another egg. I wanted the breakfast room chatter and the coffee refills to hold me there forever. Because on the other side waited a long, unrelenting autumn rain — and eventually, our divorce.

In the months, then years that followed, I lost my sense of purpose. It felt like amnesia. I forgot there were dishes piling in the sink — and I didn’t care.

I had always carried this unease about where I was from, as if my origin were a birthmark I had to hide. And then, without warning, it became inseparable from the mirror. I could no longer look at myself without also seeing where I had come from.

Paradoxically, that was when I felt an internal pull to stop rehearsing a part of someone I was not. It forced me to confront what I had long kept at bay. Living without rehearsal had to begin with a single admission: when I look in the mirror, I see where I’m from. And I keep looking.

On the phone with my parents one week, my mother told me about the apples she bought from an elder on the street. She used the Russian word for fragrant twice in a row: пахучие-пахучие. “They smell like the motherland,” she said. I got what she meant.

I know that sort of apple — it goes straight to the heart, carrying with it the tree, the soil, the light that raised it. I had eaten many such apples from my grandparents’ garden. Fresh off the branch, their skin so thin it could barely contain the sweetness inside.

Yesterday, at a florist’s, I caught another sweetness. A little girl was eyeing a potted cactus. She kept touching the needles even though they pricked her fingers. She didn’t flinch. Watching her, I realised recognition is the same: a kind of love that insists on meeting ourselves as we are, sharp edges and all.

The external world had nudged me inward. But the real change took root only when I began rewriting my internal map. It’s tedious, quiet work. And it’s infuriating that there is no way around it, if I want real — not staged — me. Like a mason chiselling away at stone, I need patience more than I need force, least of all the force of will.

The recognition wasn’t so much in the mirror glass after all. It arrived after I allowed myself to look inward, not just at the surface staring back. To look and to see what’s there.

No coincidence, then, that the girl from my childhood pictures came through when I dared to say to myself: I matter.

The words felt too small for the room and too large for my mouth, like they belonged to someone else. Yet there they were, coming from me.

It is not an ending, but the smallest beginning I know: to keep looking inward. Even when the mirror only shows the surface.

And perhaps that’s the quiet invitation: if you looked closely today, who might be waiting there to be recognised?

Leave a comment

If this piece stayed with you, consider passing it along to someone who might welcome it, too. Thank you!

Share

— Relaxed. And you? Enjoying the silent city?

— Silent city…sounds like a movie.

— Would you like another coffee?

As I walked back home, along the empty sun-drenched sidewalk, I caught myself thinking that yes, I have been enjoying it — the version where the silence isn’t on the streets or in the half-full bars, but somewhere deeper, in my body and mind. And I noticed it first in the way I dress now.

These days I reach for a soft T-shirt and worn-in jeans more often than before.

Before, I used to treat getting dressed like curating a museum exhibit. Stripes over florals. Fuchsia blocked with sunflower yellow. Artful necklaces stacked as if simplicity were a curse. I wanted to make a statement wherever I went. That, or I needed approval. Both, actually.

Despite my natural proclivity for clothes in colour and pattern — I got it from my mother — I also began using them as a way to sustain me.

What if, without them, I was simply not enough?

It didn’t start with a bang. No one shouted, You are unworthy — now get out of my face! It was a soft, gradual build-up.

In Soviet kindergartens, most parents used to pick up their children right after work, around 5 p.m. Often I was the last, because my parents worked later. The room would get quieter as the others left. I sat on a long empty bench by the entrance and watched the door.

The slow, creeping fear that settled over me while I waited was irrational. I was afraid I’d been forgotten. That I had to live with this caretaker now who always made me drink milk (I didn’t) and take afternoon naps (I pretended to). Or that she would lose patience and leave before they arrived. Darkening winter hours were the worst. Why am I still here? What’s wrong with me?

I never said a word when one of the familiar lovable faces finally walked through that door. Relief was enough. I kept my feelings to myself.

My grandmother retired around the same time my cousin was born, and naturally she was able to be his daycare (the best in town!). One day they were out on a walk and went past my kindergarten. It was the play hour and I was outside. They stopped to say hello and I was so happy to see them.

The tall fence between us was painted green.

And in my mind it became a border — between those who belonged and those who didn’t. I didn’t belong.

Remember how I went into a Prada store last year? I wanted to finally challenge that feeling. Because it never went away as I grew up — and I inherited another version of it from my parents. We didn’t have much money in the 90s, and I absorbed the quiet logic: If we can’t afford what’s inside, why walk in at all? Let’s not make a spectacle of ourselves.

The other day I was going through my childhood pictures I’d brought with me when I moved. In almost every one, I remembered how I felt — about myself. I had never gone a day without believing I was an ugly child. My hair wasn’t long enough, I wasn’t slender…I could argue with the thought, but my body remembered that feeling.

My elementary school teacher once posed a question to the class: Who is the prettiest amongst you? Without a pause, everyone — including me — pointed at one girl and said her name out loud.

How many of the beliefs I carry — about myself, about the world — are untrue? And how many more slipped in before I even knew to guard the door? I’ve been taking an inventory of them, tracing where they began and what they became. I’ll start with posture: shoulders raised and stooped, neck and jaw muscles tight, upper back constantly on fire. The body became the mind; it already knew my place.

This omnipresent — and unnoticed — feeling needed its own states of mind, its own weather patterns. Competitive, dramatic, sensitive. Shy, rushing, conceited. Desperate, detached, controlling. Overly intellectual — and always needing recognition. A soft T-shirt and worn-in jeans — unthinkable. I refused to look like anyone else. I couldn’t be forgettable.

So why return to all of this now?

On one hand, I’m holding space for the young me — the one who didn’t understand the environment around her but explained it all anyway, by thinking lesser of herself. I see you. I’m here with you.

And on the other, I’m looking at the present me — the one removing layers. The one content in a soft T-shirt and worn-in jeans. What does it mean to be present? I feel it means to allow for something unknown to emerge. Unknown to me, yet there all along, beneath all the noise…

Sometimes I’d catch my reflection in a shop window by accident and be surprised how I didn’t turn away coldly or hurry past it as I could have done.

…Love.

What does it feel like to love yourself? What does it look like? What colour is it? Does it have a sound?

It does. The sure sound of a beating heart.

How small-minded to think of it — of every part of the living body — as unworthy. The most basic, undeniable proof of love is existence itself. The absurdity, then, of seeing yourself less than fully alive. Less than worthy.

I am worthy. Why believe otherwise? It’s like stripping sunflowers of their birthright to sun.

How would one go from there?

For me it’s turning down the noise and getting reconnected with my own senses. The silent city helps. And a simpler wardrobe. It feels enough for now, like turning my face towards the sun and realising it’s been there all along.

I love summer in the city — how a window left slightly ajar, stirred by a breeze, can feel like catching a knowing, private glance between strangers…

Unlike most garments, shoes can inflict real pain. They don’t just change the way you move — they change how you stand, speak, and even how confident you feel.

So she set out to create a pair that would feel like a second skin, one that would be as comfortable as her ballroom dance shoes, the soft pair she always carried in her bag, even to work, where she led teams as an engineer.

Who is she?

She is Irina Levchenko-Kucksheva, the founder of N.early N.aked, a brand of footwear designed to move with the body, not against it. Her mission is to make sure a woman in N.early N.aked shoes doesn’t even notice she’s wearing them.

The Ballroom

To understand Irina’s fascination with movement, we need to go back where it all began —

Was there a single magical moment for you on the dance floor?

— When I was 12, I was paired with a partner 4 years older — a big gap in sports — and he was already a champion. To match and keep up with his level, I had to train three times harder than average, every single day.

— There were so many times I no longer knew what I was doing. But eventually something shifted. I suddenly started to feel my body move differently. That’s when I knew the effort had built up — and that felt very very special. Euphoric even.

Born in 1986, Irina describes her childhood as “fairly Soviet”: back then, everyone had after-school clubs. At age 4, her parents signed her up for rhythmic gymnastics, even though officially Irina wasn’t yet tall enough. When she turned 5, she switched to ballroom, which she continued throughout high school.

— I’d push myself to the limit just to get things right. There was a dance instructor I really admired, and I worked hard to get into one of her workshops. After my slot with her was over, I would just stick around longer and longer.

— When I got home, I collapsed. My legs had turned to jelly from the strain. I scared my father, but I wasn’t in pain. I just lay there thinking, Wow, this feels amazing, I really gave it my all. Talk about euphoria.

Dance has always been a part of Irina’s life. Sometimes contemporary, sometimes solo routines, and in recent years, a return to ballroom. In fact, she picked it up again around the time she started —

The Brand

— Our first big launch fell on Friday the 13th (yes!), right on the cusp of the pandemic. A massive windstorm was shaking up Moscow that day. The showroom’s heavy door refused to budge; guests had to wrestle it open just to step inside. It really felt ominous.

— Some joked it was a sign. Inspectors were already making rounds to enforce quarantine measures. We managed to stay open for one day, and then everything shut down indefinitely. So much work…

And every year since, says Irina, has been: get up, keep going, move forward. That mindset, she adds, comes from her background in sports and dance, and from her time in the corporate world, when she worked as an engineer in the oil and gas industry. She led an all-male team tasked with evaluating economic performance and efficiency at some of Russia’s largest oil refineries. She was 27 when she became head of a department where most of the men were 5, even 10, years older than her. That builds character.

When Irina wasn’t on construction sites, she was in heels — an unquestionable part of the office attire. Comfort wasn’t in the design brief. But it is very much on the N.early N.aked agenda. Comfort and sensuality, like in dance.

In life, why should one cancel out the other?

Leaving the corporate world was a leap. But she believed that this was the shoe the world — she — was missing.

The Design

The original prototype took a year and a half to get right and match what Irina envisioned: luxury pumps borne out of dance-shoe construction. She had the idea, but she didn’t bring it to life alone. Her designer and cofounder, Elizaveta Buynova, made it real.

Irina first reached out to Elizaveta on a friend’s recommendation; the friend was a subscriber to Elizaveta’s Telegram channel in Russian, Shoes & Drinks, which shares insider stories from the fashion world. In the early days, Elizaveta lived in Antwerp, and Irina would regularly fly out to work with her on prototypes. They worked closely together — refining and improving every drop — up until 2023.

Irina confesses she doesn’t keep prototypes from early collections. She wants to move forward, to do better, so why hold on to them? That kind of thinking, she admits, undervalues the work she’s already done.

What detail of the N.early N.aked pump are you most proud of?

— It’s not one detail that I’m proud of, it’s the combination of many thoughtful design choices that makes the pump what it’s meant to be: comfortable. It’s the whole package working together that makes the difference.

And that package includes an elastic leather sole that can bend into a figure 8; a well-placed heel; a soft, stretchy trim; concealed seams; and a built-in arch support. Everything you’d find in a pair of good dance shoes, only sleeker and more stylish.

— Often our customers buy our pumps to wear on their wedding day. Imagine, it’s one of the most important life events, and you spend it in ill-fitting shoes. I'd feel so awful if our pumps didn’t deliver!

N.early N.aked pumps are, quite simply, an extension of the foot. Hence the name — in these shoes you are meant to feel free, almost barefoot. There is no restriction, no compression, only motion. They fit like a glove. Or socks.

— Most of the time I wear my own shoes, probably 80% of the time. But even the most comfortable pumps are still heels — no one wears them all the time. Another thing is, by the time a new collection arrives, I’ve already lived through it for so long that when it finally gets here, I can hardly look at it anymore.

Do you see anything similar to N.early N.aked internationally?

— It’s almost like asking, Is there anyone else like you out there? On the surface, probably — a pump is a pump, it’s a classic shoe. But I care obsessively about the architecture of it, about the harmonious lines that define it. No embellishments, no decoration, just pure form. Sometimes we experiment with texture by using different materials — suede, or satin, or embossed leather — but that (and colour) is as far as it goes.

The Recognition

It may have taken Irina a year and a half — and 3 different manufacturers — to perfect her first shoe, but once it launched, word about N.early N.aked spread fast. Soon, the brand was appearing in editorial lineups, including a multi-page spread in Vogue Russia.

What runs through your mind when you see your name in major media?

— Naturally, I feel happy. I remember when Vogue wrote about us, I literally ran out to buy the issue. It was one of those strange March days when the weather couldn’t decide — sunny in the morning, slush by afternoon. I was in light blue jeans and white sneakers, splashing through the mess just to get my hands on the print edition.

— But by the time an article comes out, I’ve already lived through that chapter —and usually moved on. I rarely pause to celebrate the moment, which I know isn’t quite right.

— At first, I even avoided sharing press on social media. I thought it was bragging, that the work should speak for itself. But that’s not how it works now. New followers won’t know your story unless you tell it.

For Irina, recognition is as fleeting as it is gratifying. I think her real joy is in moving forward.

What does fashion mean to you?

— To me, it’s about style and self-expression, something that comes from within.

— Fashion also reflects the cultural mood of the moment, and how you choose to engage with it. Some people prefer to stay outside of it and wear the same thing every day. That's a choice too.

— Obviously fashion can be about belonging and membership. But that’s not really my thing. I still want to be the one wearing my clothes, not the other way around.

And the fashion industry?

— Like any business, it’s about the bottom line. The system is built to encourage endless consumption: of the good, the bad, and everything in between.

Knowing what we know about Irina, I ask what she actually likes to wear. She laughs.

— Black. Colour tires me quickly. Maybe it’s a habit from dancing: everyone always trains in black.

And shoes, how many pairs does she own?

— I didn’t count…but a lot. When I moved, I warned my interior designer that I’d need a lot of space for my shoes. She kept telling me not to worry, that there was plenty, until she actually saw them.

Irina smiles at the memory. It’s easy to imagine the designer’s face.

The Imagery

Irina’s shoes may be designed to disappear on the foot, but in imagery, well, there they speak in no uncertain terms. Sensuality is one of them. Body movement is another.

The photographs are deliberately intimate, often cropped close to a step, an arch, a curve of the ankle. It seems they’re not about posing so much as about feeling — that moment when a body shifts weight, glides, or lifts from the floor.

There is a quiet eroticism to them, too. They suggest that pleasure is not only permitted but essential — whether it’s the pleasure of movement, the pleasure of feeling almost barefoot, or the private pleasure of slipping them off and making space for whatever comes next.

Where does the seductive feel of your imagery come from?

— I think it comes from the general sense of self. One of woman’s greatest strengths is her allure: the way she moves, the energy she gives off through that movement. Supple posture and fluidity in movement are a huge part of personal style.

— When your feet or knees hurt from high heels, it restricts you, takes away from your natural grace. It’s not wrinkles that age us — it’s that stiffness in movement. We start to hunch, to tense up, and those subtle shifts reveal age far more than fine lines on the face ever do.

This harmony of body, movement, and self-expression doesn’t just come through in the shoes or the photos, it’s also at the heart of Irina herself, blending the creative and the technical in everything she does.

The Duality

Would you say you have an artistic nature?

— What do you mean by an artistic nature?

An artistic nature, hmm…good question! Let’s start with the opposite. In my view, a non-artistic person would be someone who thinks in numbers and very grounded, someone whose head isn’t in the clouds.

— For me, one doesn’t exclude the other. With my engineering degree, I’m used to thinking in numbers — and my head is definitely not in the clouds! At the same time, I see myself as a creative person. Both sides come together in my current role as a fashion founder. On one hand, there’s a lot of business administration; on the other, design and product development.

— Anyone who’s been in fashion long enough will tell you that spreadsheets and logistics far outweigh the creative part. I can’t just work when I feel inspired and work not when I don’t. Reality, at least for me, looks different. It’s always a blend of technical thinking and creative vision. Both are essential to keep everything running.

As it stands, Irina handles everything — from concept and collection development to factory coordination, production control, shipping, customs, labelling, and certification. While she outsources teams for various processes, she remains involved in every single one. But she also knows when to step back.

— I try not to micromanage. I want to give my team space to approach a task or challenge in their own way. I step in only when things are clearly not working. But they have to try first.

— It’s actually a great feeling when something works out — even if you don’t fully understand why. Maybe it never worked when you tried it, but someone else approached it differently, and suddenly things start to click.

What makes a day feel like a good one for you?

—A good day for me means not being constantly interrupted by logistics tasks. Sometimes it feels like I’m the wolf in that old Elektronika Nu, Pogodi! game [the Soviet version of Tom and Jerry with the Wolf and the Hare], catching eggs in all the baskets but never really moving forward. Just keeping things afloat isn’t the same as true progress. Days like that often leave me frustrated. A truly successful day is one where I can focus on bigger, more creative tasks.

— And dance is a must. Sometimes I even train twice a day, morning and evening. It helps me recharge!

Since the beginning, how has the brand evolved — and you with it?

— A lot has changed, and at the same time, nothing at all. The core values are the same.

— It’s always hard to assess your own progress from the inside. For some, it’s about charts, checklists, and reports. But not all change can be measured directly. Sometimes it has nothing to do with quality, and other times it has everything to do with quality.

— Over the past 5 years we’ve had to change factories 5 times. Each time, it’s a completely new logistical process. We recently started working with a factory in China — and that’s a whole new world. We had to navigate all the nuances and details ourselves; no one hands you that kind of knowledge on a silver platter.

How do you handle moments of self-doubt, if any?

— If any? There are many! I won’t exaggerate when I say we entrepreneurs often oscillate between I'm a genius and I'm a total failure who has no idea what to do next. When things fall apart, I pull myself back together and keep going. And if I’m going to keep going, I might as well find joy in it, or at least new meaning or new ways forward. As I said earlier, we’ve had to start over more than once.

Irina’s go-to formula for keeping the spirits up is to picture the end result: your body follows where your mind leads, and motivation always catches up in the moment.

But who is Irina when nobody’s watching?

The Identity

I ask her to describe herself in 3 words. She doesn’t hesitate.

— Stubborn. It can be a good thing, but definitely has a downside too.

— Driven. But sometimes I don’t take time to acknowledge what I’ve already achieved, always chasing the next thing.

— Hardworking. I often forget that not everyone moves at the same pace. I get so deep into my work that I may not notice that the people around me are already exhausted. They won’t necessarily say a thing, and I won’t necessarily catch it. In this way, I tend to push too hard.

Then she tells me a story that reveals all 3 in her so well.

Before starting her brand Irina took a course in fashion marketing. The first assignment was to create a mask representing yourself.

— The most creative thing I’d done before was dance, so I thought, Ok, I’ll make a Capricorn mask, since I’m a Capricorn. I got some wire and other materials to craft the horns. I spent two days making them, wrestling with myself in the process; I really have this habit of overcomplicating everything.

When the day came and she saw what everyone else had done, she realised she might have gone overboard. Most of the group used apps or filters, throwing something together in just minutes. One person literally just pulled up their hoodie to show how they felt.

— And there I was, with these 2 hand-woven horns I’ve been obsessing over for days. It was honestly hilarious. But that’s how I am: all in, all the time.

Irina laughs, but I feel there’s humility in the admission. This “all-in” approach is her greatest strength — and a challenge.

— I can be completely grounded, structured, and pragmatic, but sometimes I get so absorbed in something that switching gears is really hard. Rewriting something a 100 times because every time I tried to focus, someone called or something pulled me away — that’s not unusual for me.

Do you have a beauty secret, including for inner beauty?

— An interesting question! I think it’s important to stay curious and open-minded, to keep pushing forward when everyone says it can’t be done. You see this a lot in sports: people get turned down because you don’t have the 'right' build or abilities. But if you lack in one area, you definitely have strengths in another. Resist generalising and lumping every experience together; treat each one for what it truly is. That’s when you can create the most comfortable pumps, or whatever else you set your mind to.

And if you’re wondering, sleep is not Irina’s beauty secret. 4 or 5 hours a night — she has always been like this — is enough for her, she says.

To you, what does it mean to be a woman?

— It’s about duality.

— On one hand, it's softness — empathy, acceptance, gentleness, sensuality, and femininity. On the other, it’s passion, drive, action. These are completely different energies: the calm, cat-like state, as if you’ve been mellowed by the sun — and the feeling that everything should be bursting with energy. Both are about knowing yourself and finding harmony within. You feel it in dance too — it’s both art and discipline.

In life, have you had to face prejudices or stereotypes — from others and even from yourself?

— Yes, absolutely. I think a lot of people tend to think in clichés; outside of personal context, they don’t really look beneath the surface. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s been my observation.

— I have my own limiting beliefs too. They say a beginner has a thousand ways to do something, while a professional has only one or two. Sometimes, too much knowledge and experience can box you in. After all, experience is just a mix of specific circumstances that happened then, not now. Still, once burnt, you tend to play it safe, even when it’s no longer necessary.

Speaking about identity, how do you see Russian culture influencing you or your worldview?

— For me Russia is inseparable from the image of our incredible, strong women. It’s amazing how much they manage to accomplish in a single day!

— We are the kind of people who can be a one-person orchestra — and I can definitely say that about myself. We wear many hats and juggle different professions and roles.

— Remember that saying: if you don’t know how to do something, just start and you’ll figure it out? That describes us perfectly.

— And on a personal level, Russian culture is deeply connected to dance. But you’d expect that from me, no?

Is there anything you’ll never start your day without? Tea, coffee, stretching, meditation?

— It’s not that I don’t have any rituals, I’m just not attached to any one in particular. I don’t treat them as sacred, like I have to drink coffee every morning. I can wake up, do a strength workout at 8 a.m., drop down for a set of push-ups — and head straight into the day.

Moving forward, as always.

And you know what I think? N.early N.aked is more than a brand. It’s a quiet act of hope. A testament to the woman who keeps dancing through life with grace — in heels.

Subscribe now

— I was a creative child. I drew a lot, clothes especially. And I loved singing. I also wrote poems, to which my family would say, “Poems are good, but you better study now”.

— Homework and softball were all I focused on since I was 6, and I regret that I didn’t get to do a musical or drawing school like everyone else in my class. Once I got into an Olympic Reserve Sports School, there was no time left for anything else. At 10, I felt so grown-up to be away from home for most of the week!

Imagine the courage, discipline and character it took to be a 10 year-old in the high-performance sports world and nowhere near your family! I found myself in awe when I heard that. For perspective, when I was 10 I would burst into tears days before I’d have to go away from my parents for a week in the summer to spend it with my grandmother…

With many of her childhood passions and interests left untapped then, Irina started immersing herself in them at an older age. By the time she was 25, she had turned into a multi-hyphenate with diverse professional experiences, but there are 3 in particular she considers the cornerstones of her career as well as her identity: being an athlete, psychology, and art history. Indirectly they have come to be the pillars of her brand NEGOZHE as well.

NEGOZHE is about one’s path through life and self-exploration. Besides her own stack of experiences, Irina builds the concept on her many observations from her art history lessons about how artists rarely stick to one style or form throughout their life. We each are not unlike an artist in that sense, she explains. Perceiving and responding to the environment as we evolve but not being defined by it — today we may want more colour, tomorrow more quiet — we reimagine ourselves time and time again. NEGOZHE pieces — wearable objects — are meant to reflect that. Each drop is called an ‘album’, as in something used to collect. To collect one’s memories and life experiences.

The album DETSTVO (‘childhood’ in Russian) launched NEGOZHE a year ago. In it are 4 unique signature pieces.

Stemming from the word kon’, Russian for horse, konyashka means ‘little horse’ and refers to a beloved wooden toy horse, a much coveted playing companion. KONYASHKA is a nod to childhood innocence and imagination, because who didn’t set out to see the big wide world astride their konyashka?

— The idea for the pendants came to me after my trip to Lake Baikal, a majestic site, a place of power. I’m not a water sign and I’m not even that much into zodiac signs, but for some reason I’m very drawn to water. To be in a steaming hot banya or swimming for me is like peeling layers off an onion — where the onion is myself — until there is nothing left but the very essence. That’s exactly how I felt travelling around Lake Baikal.

— I got back home on a high. As I was finishing up some work, it struck me that I wasn’t that keen on what I was doing and that I didn’t want to continue doing the work I’m not very keen on. I needed to create something meaningful, straight from the heart.

That same clarity of vision came in handy when naming the brand too. The name NEGOZHE was the result of a four-hour-long brainstorming session between Irina and her friend Evgeniia, a brand and communications strategist by profession and now a brand manager at NEGOZHE.

— She had a long list of questions for me about how I imagined it, even how I wanted it to sound, but in the end the word negozhe was her find. I loved it, and we had a good chuckle when we saw how it can be frenchified with an accent on ‘e’, something for when we reach our international customers, we joked.

Getting the name registered posed a little challenge, though. At the registering office they were informed there was a slight chance it may not comply with the naming regulations because of its negative connotation: negozhe is a literary Russian word meaning ‘you shouldn’t’ or ‘it is not right’ or ‘it is not proper’ and it’s used to show disapproval. With supporting research at hand, Irina managed to appease the registering office’s concerns. NEGOZHE the brand is meant to inspire, not disapprove.

— And from a marketing point of view, negozhe works really well too: NEGOZHE to be without our pendants, or NEGOZHE to doubt. See?

Irina’s eyes light up when she talks about NEGOZHE.

What were the stages of the creation process for the pendants?

— First I sketched the drawings and a friend of mine rendered them in 3-D. Next, we had them printed, which allowed us to see the measurements in real life and tweak and adjust. Having gotten that down, we approached a ceramics studio and had the pendants hand-molded — as they will always be — after our improved 3-D models. (‘Our’ potterer is the sweetest man!) We chose clay as the material for our debut pieces because we wanted to emphasise their playfulness and uniqueness. Moving forward, we will work with more materials, silver, for instance.

NEGOZHE pendants are meant to evoke emotions deeply rooted in childhood, yes. At the same time — and from the art history point of view — they are the reimagining of the familiar objects of the past meant for the present. Same object, different use.

Meaning that which doesn’t topple, nevalyashka isn’t just a popular roly-poly toy, made ubiquitous due to mass production in the Soviet era; it’s a Russian symbol of perseverance, cheerfulness, and resilience. When life knocks you down, you get back up and carry on.

— After I got a spinal injury I considered quitting professional sports, but I was convinced to return. I re-started in a new team and we took gold at the Russian Championship 4 years running, beating the longstanding champion each of those times. We qualified for the European Championship, but had to drop out because half of the team, myself included, got COVID. These days I play softball as a hobby, the body craves it, and it’s a great way to bring the mind back to base. A bonus — I met my husband in my amateur team.

How did you get into softball?

— I was overly energetic and my parents felt that playing sports would do me good. The choice in my hometown was between gymnastics, for which I was too tall, and softball, for which I turned out perfect. I didn’t resist my parents’ pushing me to focus on sports alone, I trusted they would know what was better for me.

— At 17, I graduated from the Olympic Reserve Sports School and got a secondary professional degree in physical education. After that I got into a Bachelor’s in psychology.

— Why psychology? I thought it would help me understand people better, or at least provide me with enough knowledge and tools for self-regulation. Always useful!

What about your interest in fashion? When and how did it start?

— When I was very young and watched all episodes of Top Model Po-Russki as well as America’s Next Top Model. But in reality I think most influence on my fashion sense I got from my mother. She had her own clothing store and I watched her at work a lot. She really knew how to help anyone find something they’d love, no exceptions, even the most disgruntled with the ‘nothing looks good on me’ attitude. She has a knack for putting outfits together for any figure or personality type. I don’t dress like her, I’m more practical than my mother and wouldn’t be in heels all day, but I got the understanding like hers.

Do you follow any rules when you get dressed? Does one even need any style rules these days?

— We live in times that allow us the complete freedom of dressing how we like, which is great. The only rule for me is dressing for the occasion, let’s not wear shorts and socks to a theatre.

Do you have any funny stories about your clothes?

— I do! My light chiffon dress flew up as I walked over a metro grating in one of Paris’s more conservative neighbourhoods, exactly like in that Marilyn Monroe scene except I didn’t expect it, it felt so inappropriate. That dress stayed inside for the rest of my trip.

The word balalaika comes from the Russian verb balabolit’, which means ‘to babble’ or ‘to chatter’, and isn’t it the most fitting name for the traditional musical instrument created to chase away the blues and raise the spirits?

It may be time to mention Irina’s love for music, and that she is a DJ too!

— It’s been my dream since childhood. “Mama, I would really love to do this!”, I exclaimed when I saw a DJ perform at a show in my hometown, and this feeling has been with me ever since.

— When I moved to Moscow, I found a DJ studio and took mixing lessons. After a while I had my first set, and even a gig. I don’t remember how I managed to mix music in the first 20 minutes of my time, it was the kind of fear that numbed me from head to toe. It got somewhat better by the end, but considering I grabbed someone else’s phone on my way out I must have remained in the state of affect for a while.

And how is it going now?

— I’m very self-critical, so usually I won’t play until it’s perfect. But I’m learning to go easy on myself. Last year I DJed at my own wedding and had 3 gigs around the city. I’m teaching myself to let go a bit and enjoy the process more than the ideal outcome.

— I get asked often if I have a favourite DJ, but honestly no. It’s not about the who that inspires me, it’s purely about the what and that’s music. I especially love mixing hip-hop and R’n’B tracks, it’s technically more challenging and I love that.

When I ask Irina if there is anything she considers her calling, she smiles and says that at the age of 30 (almost) she has yet to figure that out.

— But I can tell you what shapes my outlook on life. When I travel, I try to understand how locals live and what they face in their environment, often something extreme, like what I discovered travelling around the Kamchatka Peninsula [Russian Far East]. Seeing people treat the elements as part of their daily routine — volcanic eruptions; blizzards and impenetrable snowdrifts; deluges — reminds me that life as I know it is not how others experience it. It’s humbling and enriching at once. And like in art, things aren’t always what they seem — you can only understand a painting when you step back and look at it from different angles. I think we’d all benefit from doing that more often in everyday life.

The sea or the mountains?

— Mountains. I know, I know, I professed my love for water earlier. But standing at the foot of a mountain brings everything into perspective. We’re so small next to something that untameable. My worries always shrink up there, maybe because I’m reminded of my scale and of how little I actually need to hold on to. We should stop trying to control everything and simply let ourselves enjoy life.

Out of all your passions and interests, which one is the closest to your heart right now?

— It must be my budding DJ-ing, because to me music is nothing lesser than the soul’s song.

Ptichka-svistok is Russian for a bird whistle, and besides being a traditional and popular toy it’s a symbol of spring, renewal and the human soul, as well as a charm to aid against evil spirits (which, it was believed, don’t like the whistling sound).

Do you have a favourite Russian tradition?

— My favourite Russian tradition has to be the banya [a traditional Russian steam bath with a wood stove]. Then there’s the wreath-making on Ivan Kupala Night [a folk holiday that celebrates the summer solstice], especially the part where unmarried young women float their wreaths down rivers to tell fortunes and predict their marriage prospects. It’s a beautiful tradition, although I’ve always had a few questions. When the wreaths all look more or less the same, as they often do, how does anyone know which one is theirs?

— Speaking of Russian culture, I feel like we Russians are only now beginning to re-discover how rich and layered it really is. Like many of my peers, I’ve travelled abroad more than I have within Russia. We tend to think we know our own culture, but that’s such an illusion. Every region has its own folklore, customs and landscapes.

— That’s why more and more people are now choosing holidays that let them immerse themselves in real rural Russian life — haymaking, craft workshops, traditional dancing, singing, jumping over bonfires. At the top of my own list is a weeklong stay in a village in the Arkhangelsk region, up in the Russian North. I think experiences like that would resonate with anyone curious about Russian culture, because Russia really begins outside the big cities.

If you close your eyes, what is the first image that comes to mind when you think of Russian culture?

— Young women in red sarafan dresses, light on their feet, with red crepe satin ribbons in their hair, windswept.

Is there a work of art that never fails to leave an impression on you?

— Theater, it expands my heart. Watching a good play is not unlike an emotional cleanse, I cry, I laugh, I forget myself in the moment.

Don’t you find it so genuine and human when one lets art into their inner world like that and isn’t fazed by any emerging emotions in public? The old adage is true: there is strength in vulnerability.

In a letter to his goddaughter, C.S.Lewis wrote: “Someday you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.” And isn’t that true too! As adults we often find ourselves longing for childhood, no matter how (un)happy we may have been then. What is it that we’re missing? The idealised simplicity of it?

— Nostalgia is our collective trait. Our generation and our parents’ generation feel nostalgic for what we used to have (“before the internet, it used to be better”). The newer generations feel nostalgic for what they never had, zoomers long for a personal cassette player, for example.

How would you describe childhood?

— Endless summer days, filled with very loud laughter and equally loud tears. A time when you are a curious explorer, your imagination limitless, and there is no clear line between what’s real and what’s not. Anything feels possible.

What emotions do you experience when someone buys a NEGOZHE?

— I feel deeply touched every time someone chooses one of our objects, and although rationally I know we have done everything to make them the best they can be, I still worry: what if it’s not quite what they expected?

NEGOZHE’s customers, Irina adds, are creative people open for new emotional experiences. They are able to notice something special about simple things. They interact with the world from a place of joy and openness. And they really love how tactile NEGOZHE objects are.

What does your team believe in?

— There are 3 of us right now and we believe in love and that everything in this world should be done for love. The more wood you’ll throw into the fire, the more warmth you’ll get back. We also believe that each of us creates the world around us, and how much kindness there is in it is only up to us.

How much do you get to do in a day?

— That depends on the day, but to me it often feels like I barely scratch the surface even though my friends are often amazed at how much I manage to get done.

Since the moment we started talking, I noticed how soft and unhurried Irina’s voice is, how that softness and pace act as a counterpoint that holds every part of her story together.

What would be a miracle for you on an ordinary day?

— That moment when you are able to slow down and notice the small transient things, like how rain water glistens in a puddle in the sun, or how fragrant the wind is, and all you have to do for joy is breathe it all in.

Let’s collect moments like these, more every day, because it would be NEGOZHE to let them go unnoticed.

P.S. Which pendant speaks to you most?

Leave a comment

Subscribe now

Nikolai and I met online in what seems like the 19th century now, and after a summer of hours-long phone calls (landline) he booked a flight from Amsterdam to Rostov-on-Don to come and see me. I stood on my tiptoes each time the doors at the Arrivals slid open, and I jumped up when I saw him: he looked exactly like in the pictures he sent me, exactly like I pictured him. Hello! Hi! Let’s go, the taxi is waiting.

Subscribe now

Every morning I met him in his hotel — he always had a cup of hot black coffee ready for me when I knocked on his door — and every night he brought me home (You have to sleep in your bed, my mother said). We were together like this for the whole 2 weeks. I fell in love, and since he asked my father for my hand I hoped he did too.

Next summer he broke up with me over the phone. I was calling him.

— Is it over?

Silence.

My mother saw me with the receiver pressed to my cheek, came closer and whispered, Don’t cry just yet.

Should this have happened now, I would have hung up and bothered no longer, but at 19 (which is 21 years ago) I had to hear him say the words in person. So I talked my parents into letting me take a gap year and spend it in the Netherlands as a baby sitter. I argued that it would be good for my English, I’d have so much practice. I wouldn’t be staying in Amsterdam, but The Hague where my host family lived was close enough (about 40 min by train). My first time abroad.

Nikolai and I kept making plans to meet up and have a heart-to-heart that year, and even though he kept cancelling, last minute every time, I kept boarding an Amsterdam-bound train. The bicycles, architecture, faces — I hadn’t seen anything similar before. Train after train, the city stopped being a place where he lived and turned into a place where I would love to live.

A Russian affair with Amsterdam goes back to 1697, the year Peter the Great travelled to Western Europe to learn and observe (and being the first Russian sovereign to do so). He was 25 then, and his primary interest lay in shipbuilding, navy practices and navy-adjacent sciences such as astronomy and navigation, and yet European dress didn’t go past him unnoticed. Upon returning home after his 18-month trip, he issued an edict to replace traditional Russian robes with European fashions, personally chopped off the beards of his noblemen and decreed the construction of his version of Amsterdam, the future city of Saint Petersburg. Indeed, who would stay indifferent to Amsterdam’s gabled facades and their still reflections in the narrow canals? Peter the Great’s young heart must have skipped a beat or a few. I know mine did.

Dawn starts like a Polaroid picture, dark. It’s so quiet out that locking my front door makes me feel like a cat thief, one rash turn of the key will sound like shattered glass for blocks around. Then, finally, the skyline shows, the gingerbread houses, tall and storied, against the young and unsure sky. The front door of one such house opens and out comes a man with a dog, a Boxer. The man is wearing an olive-green corduroy blazer, his shoulders stooped, and a hat, black and so wide-rimmed that you can’t see his face. He left the lights on and his windows have no curtains. Inside there are yellow tea roses on the wooden table and a shawl draped over a dining room chair.

There are flowers now wherever the eye falls, climbing roses especially. Some of them smell so citrusy it’s easy to mistake them for a lemon. “Can you believe it?”, I say to a friend on our walk around the canals. It’s one of those days when Amsterdam is at its prettiest, sparkling from sunshine, not too hot and humid — and full of promise. Spring at its end.

— Martha, wait! Wait! Martha!

To cycle through the city on a deep Friday night is to feel its breath under the influence, loud and erratic. Like fish to bait, partygoers gather for refreshments around the lighted snack bar. Stained napkins and empty plastic bottles are strewn across the sidewalk, a whiff of mustard floats around.

Canal houses again; they loom over the night's last hours. A couple is tangled in a difficult moment. The girl crosses the road, stumbling over a curbstone. The guy is half-a-minute behind her, tries to run, but stumbles every other step too, cries her name, wants her to wait. In response, she will only take off her heels and charge forward, away, her feet getting pounded by the sullied and uneven cobbles, her hair loose.

— Martha, Martha! Wait!

A new day, and rain. But rain now is ok, it doesn’t make your skin crawl like it can in the cold. A young woman crosses a steep canal bridge on her aging bicycle, it creaks as she pushes down the pedals in her knee-high, well-worn leather boots. Her beige slip skirt clings to her bare legs and the wind pulls her brown hair that is the exact colour as her low-neck sweater with shoulder straps. It can be a brand-new Dries van Noten, or she pulled it at a thrift store. And perhaps that is the whole point: the vibe should trump the tag, and that you are only free inasmuch as you don’t get attached to how you are perceived. And isn’t that the true definition of style?

Traditionally the Dutch aren’t eager to stand out from the crowd, which is a little ironic considering the past opulence of the Dutch Golden Age. Doe normaal, ‘act/be normal’ is a local modus operandi, and fitting in/looking same is a preferred way of dressing. Obviously what kind of sameness that would be is determined by one’s income and social environment, but the point being that it’s best to dress like your peers.

Yet there is a distinct style in Amsterdam, and it’s to be found amongst its younger people who thrift, shop vintage and don’t need to look up to anyone for inspiration because they themselves are of the arts. They are enrolled or graduated from one of the city’s best known art schools, and a solid number of them is from abroad. They may wear a fraying paisley jacket with a pair of polished dress shoes, or a hip-hop shirt and boxers, paired with a bright red lip and clear-glitter jelly flats, and every time that contrast will feel unintentional, thrown in together at the whim of a mood, likely on a dime — and uncurated. I wonder if that’s not the whole point — think less, feel more. I also wonder what Peter the Great would have thought.

Happy 750th, Amsterdam! May this mean that as far as lifespan goes you are only in your spring! My Russian affair was never really with him — it was always with you.

Share PEAR NOT BEAR

PS. Dear Reader, there is now an option to upgrade your subscription to PEAR NOT BEAR to paid. If you enjoy reading my letters, please consider doing it. Your support will mean I’d be able to dedicate ever more time to PEAR NOT BEAR and its growth. Thank you! And to the ones who already did, I’m so grateful!

— He regularly traveled to Novgorod region for business, and on one such trip the word reached him that the local factory Krestetskaya Strochka was filing for bankruptcy. By then krestetskaya strochka was the only surviving regional craft in the area and to lose the factory meant to let the craft die off.

Fashion designer Alexandra Georgieva’s first goal was going to be the preservation of a Russian cultural heritage known, revered worldwide but barely extinct a decade ago.

—It was a sad sad sad sight, the roof broken, walls crumbling, heating removed, and only 3 employees remaining. I’d just had my 3rd daughter, and I wasn’t ready for a massive reconstruction project that would require my on-site presence daily (the factory is 275 km from St.Petersburg, where we live). I was aware of what had to be done and I had no space to do it, so we passed.

A year later the opportunity presented itself again. The factory’s then owners got in touch with Alexandra and Anton one more time, said the bankruptcy was imminent, maybe they would like to reconsider?

— We did. But it was 2015, the time when all global brands were peaking in Russia. Who would be interested in the local embroidery?

And so Alexandra’s second goal, perhaps more challenging one, was to convey its indelible beauty and value to her contemporaries. She had an idea how. Fashion.

If there were no Krestetskaya Strochka, would there be Alexandra Georgieva the brand?

— I started the brand because of the strochka, so I really don’t know if I would have done it without. You know there are certain life events that define your life trajectory so completely it’s hard to imagine anything else. Krestetskaya Strochka defined my path for me.

— It’s a big task to popularise a folk craft when as consumers most of us prefer to look for the imported fashion, but I won’t stop trying. I want us to see and appreciate our own riches. Our grandmothers knew of krestetskaya strochka, maybe our mothers, but we no longer, and yet it’s a part of who we are as a culture, a part waiting to be rediscovered and applied to our modern life.

It’s the year 1860. A unique embroidery craft is being born in the village of Kresttsy in northwestern Russia, where, in the summer, its locals cultivate and grow flax, and come winter, make homespun linen out of it for sale. To draw the attention of passing wealthy Russians on the road between St. Petersburg and Moscow, they start embroidering the fabric with a perforated geometric pattern. Both men and women, young and old, spend their long winter nights doing, perfecting the unusual intricate needlework, a labour-intensive technique that is going to be known as krestetskaya strochka. Literally, a stitch out of Kresttsy.

1929. The many embroidering households of Kresttsy are brought together under one roof — the factory Krestetskaya Strochka starts its awarded and eventful life. Its craftsmen and -women’s artful works go on to live in the permanent collection of the Hermitage Museum. Both then and now, the factory is the only manufacturer of the namesake embroidery.

— My husband knew of it earlier than me. Actually, he didn’t know — his father’s acquaintances from Sweden did. On one of their visits in the early 90s they asked his father to take them to Kresttsy, and out of curiosity Anton, only 20 then, joined them.

— The factory was still working, but the turbulent economic changes sweeping through Russia after the USSR had dissolved were starting to affect it. At the request of their wives the visiting Swedes were there to buy boxfuls of the unique embroidered textiles, tablecloths, napkins, bath robes, and what have you. They got it from the factory’s warehouse for a joke of a price, maybe 100 US dollars for all. When my husband asked what it was they were buying, they laughed and said, ‘You'll know when you grow older’.

What does it feel like to work with Russia’s cultural heritage? Does it determine the way you approach your designs?

— I often feel our embroidery is misperceived as something from a grandmother’s trunk. The whole point of my designs is to show how contemporary and relevant kresteskaya strochka can be. That said, I consider it an honour to be able to work with something that has so much cultural significance and history. As the factory’s co-owner I’m free to take my designs in any direction, but as a guardian of this heritage, which I think is what I am here, I want to preserve its elevated aura in timeless and considered clothes. It is in my plans to start creating wedding as well as couture collections with krestetskaya strochka.

And neither will be a tall order for Alexandra. Krestetskaya Strochka already collaborated with a Russian fashion designer Ulyana Sergeenko who is well known for her couture collections and whose clothes were spotted on Beyonce, Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Rihanna, amongst many more.

In your opinion, when do luxury and handicraft become synonymous?

— Meticulous unique handiwork required for each embroidery takes time, and in our fast-paced world, changing and spinning ever so faster, time is the ultimate luxury. There are customers who get very curious and want to find out more about why each piece takes time to make, but there are many more who simply don’t know or never been shown. Which isn’t surprising at all, as a culture we forgot the value and significance of Russian embroidery. Before 1917, everyone embroidered, the princesses and the farmers; not so much after though.

Your designs are undoubtedly classic, but there is something else, something mystical about them, and that's very attractive.

— I find the patterns — always and ever hand-drawn — for krestetskaya strochka so special. Mostly they are various configurations of stars, snowflakes and crystals, that’s what Kresttsy’s dwellers saw in their wintered windows and reproduced on their homespun fabrics at the time. I think they resemble mandalas, those ancient graphic symbols of the universe. Look long enough and you’ll feel your energy shift.

Is there anything you won’t do for any money in the world?

— On Krestetskaya Strochka’s premises there is a museum, founded in 1930, and its records show that many a dignitary - Queen Elizabeth II, Juan Carlos I of Spain, Emperor of Japan — received the embroidery as gifts from the state, so there is a certain level to uphold. I won’t be doing streetwear with krestetskaya strochka, or something like that. And I don’t want to make disposable clothes that will only add to the global pollution.

This makes me curious about Alexandra’s take on good and bad taste. Does bad taste even exist? Some say there is no such thing, both are 2 sides of 1 coin.

— What is bad taste for one, is good for another, it’s individual. And while there are established rules on colour or proportions, creativity isn’t bound by any rules. Having said that, I strongly believe there are certain fundamentals of taste that make it good, and in my opinion they are culture at large and critical thinking. Both are like chisels for good taste, they help remove the flab. Besides it takes years for one’s taste to take shape because it’s a reflection of one’s inner world and its complexities and transformation.

Subscribe now

Alexandra tells me that every professional experience and education she’s got was preparing her for Krestetskaya Strochka. Parallel to high school she graduated from a drawing school. She went on to get a degree in tailoring and clothing construction, and then another in design. And she worked in St. Petersburg’s luxury retail for a time learning to meet the demands and foretell the wishes of very exacting customers (and feeling very comfortable doing it).

— But I got married early, at 25, and during my second studies I started having my daughters, 1 every 3 years, so I didn’t really have a career. When my husband heard of Krestetskaya Strochka being for sale, he thought of me instantly, he knew I had a lot of potential in me.

Now you’ve got 4 children, Krestetskaya Strochka being the latest.

— A very accurate description!

— ‘It’s a good idea!’, said exactly no one when we were in the process of buying the dilapidated Krestetskaya Strochka. Instead every one said, ‘What on earth are you getting into?’ But we did what felt right to us in the moment.

That’s the only way. But how do you quiet the outside noise to hear your own voice in such moments?

— I break down the problem at hand and ask myself questions about each part separately, like why am I worried about it, or what can I do to change it? You just have to be brutally honest with yourself. I would rather make my own wrong decision and learn from it than follow someone else’s idea about what I should do.

Next to all her qualifications and life turns, there is something else that shaped Alexandra’s view of fashion. It’s her beloved native city of St. Petersburg.

— I proudly call myself a northern mouse. I adore this cold, damp, grey, rainy, dirty, magnificent city of mine. My clothes are an extension of my love for St.Petersburg, they are restrained and often monochrome; pastels and white in the summer, grey and black in the winter.

What was your first fashion memory? And most cherished one?

— My first fashion memory is of me cutting up my mother’s beautiful dress to fit me (when she wasn’t home). I even had her heels on to make myself taller and still I had to cut off the whole hemline. I must have been 4 then.

— My most cherished memory would have to be when my mother bought me a sewing machine when I was 14. I dressed myself from head to toe, sometimes I even made dresses for sale. When I didn’t have enough money to get new fabrics I would ‘rework’ my mother’s clothes. She never blamed me.

Alexandra’s voice goes softer and she smiles when she mentions her mother. This reminds me to ask her about inspiration in her life and how she experiences it physically.

— When an idea comes you have to capture it first, you have to draw faster or write faster to articulate something or it’ll go back where it came from. So once inspiration hits, it’s the feeling of driving at high speed on highway, like you can’t just stop suddenly. Goosebumps are a surefire cue you are onto something, the body won’t ever lie, ever. Generally, the more willing you are to see and notice the good everywhere, the more frequent is the inspiration. And recently people are a great source of it for me, what they say and do (or don’t), how they look and move.

What drives you day in and day out?

— I want Russian people to see and appreciate our cultural riches and the traditions that make us, that’s my biggest motivation as a designer. You know when a person equates their self-worth with the approval from others, so we as a culture had lost touch with our inner world. What makes us unique? Under the Soviet ideology we’d been taught to look (grey) and think the same for decades, after that it was only the high-end imported goods that mattered. And now we’ve been forced to pause and reevaluate ourselves.

Is there anything that brings about procrastination or resistance to do it on your part, and why? For instance, I have this when it’s time sit down and start writing but I find a dozen other things to do first.

— I give more than I receive, I know that about myself, and so I have to guard where my energy goes. Which is why I’m resistant towards social events, public talks and even interviews, because I prefer my work to speak for me, and because I often need a long time and sufficient rest to restore afterwards, sometimes up to 3 days.

That’s true, by the way, Alexandra doesn’t do interviews — period. What you are reading is an exclusive for PEAR NOT BEAR.

Is it possible to leave work at work, even if it’s your life calling?

— It’s impossible for me, and it’s my biggest pain, one of them. Especially in recent years when global events affect so many of business processes almost daily, it’s hard to not discuss work at home, and sometimes there is no way around it. But the children need to see their mother and father home unencumbered, so we really try to leave everything till the next working hours.

Is there anything you won’t start a day without?

— Sleep, I can’t do without enough of it. Sleep is my parallel reality, my second life.

What do you wear to feel strong and invincible?

— At any event I wear my own clothes. But I don’t wear the strochka every day, I too need time apart. My style is pretty feminine, I love dresses and skirts. A woman is a gentle flowing being, and a dress is the best garment to channel that energy.

And if you know you have a difficult meeting ahead, with a difficult person, what would you wear then?

— I will make a point to dress even better then, but honestly I don’t have difficult people in my environment. In the rare instant I feel I might feel uneasy or uncomfortable around someone, I remind myself it’s a human being in front of me, just as I am.

A positive outlook on life is Alexandra’s forte, but she says her acute intolerance of injustice — she’s been like this since childhood — can bring her down and make her irritable and reactionary.

— In those moments I also have to remind myself of empathy because negativity just won't help anything.

Success and luck, what’s the difference?

— To me success is seeing happy eyes around me as a result of our collective work. It’s a sum of my whole team’s output and luck.

— And luck isn’t about concrete numbers and actions, luck is metaphysical, it’s about the energy. I’d say that to me luck is synonymous with the unconditional trust that every problem or detour will work out for my greater good. That I will be guided.

What’s your identity?

— I am a curious person, I like self-discovery. But who am I? I don’t know. I’m a human being born on this planet. Why this planet? I must have had work to do here, lessons to go through. I’m a happy mother of 3. I’m a wife. But most of all I’m a mother.

And what does being Russian mean to you?

— Goodness me, what a mighty question! I can only speak for myself here. To me it means being here and now, to intuit this world and do something for it. A Russian person is rather special, unpredictable even.

What Russian work of literature would you recommend to a person who’d like to get to know Russia beyond the headlines?

— And Quiet Flows the Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov. This is my favourite book, even though it’s hard to read. It deals with a Russian life during the extraordinary historical upheaval [the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and Russian Civil War], and how a person can shift their views and beliefs almost overnight in search of greater meaning. It’s a very deep exploration of human nature, and I get so many questions when I read it. If you want to learn about the complexities of a Russian soul, this is the book for it.

Most valuable advice you’ve been given?

— Be here and now, and be honest with yourself. The rest is not under your control.

What is luxury in 2025?

— To be able to hear each other. Empathy and compassion. If everyone shows a tiny bit more patience and kindness towards each other, the world will be so much different. It’s a chain reaction, from person to person until there is light everywhere.

Light, beauty, creativity, and culture.

“Dear Ms Veronika Chervonsky, I’ve seen online your latest collection, BORSCH, presented on the runway at the most recent Moscow Fashion Week, and I would now consider it a crime not to tell my readers about you and your fashion brand. ”

While the models strutted down the red runway in unique textures, prints and vibrant colours inspired by beets and cabbage and mesh bags to hold fresh produce, the collection BORSCH is not exactly about the eponymous dish itself.

As there is no one recipe for the almighty, omnipresent borsch — every cook adds their own touch — so there is no one way to be in a relationship. Which is what Veronika invites the viewer, the fashion lover to think about — various ways we do and season our relationships, or, perhaps, not enough, or too much.

— Happy you picked up on the irony about my BORSCH, the whole brand is rife with irony. I started it because it was my time, I had to act.

CHERVONSKY is a fashion brand founded by Veronika Chervonsky, an advertising producer turned HSE Art and Design School alumnus; it focuses on storytelling; and it’s got a unique concept.

— I can’t thank my studies supervisor enough, my fashion father as I like to call him, Leo Alekseev [a fashion designer and a Saint Martins graduate]. He saw into me instantly. For our first assignment we had to present our ‘treasures’, something that would be an inspiration for a beginning. Some went for a childhood photo, some chose gems, but I couldn’t relate to any material object. ‘Can my husband be my treasure?’, I asked my supervisor. As I said it, he slowly looked up and went, ‘This can be a beginning of a cool brand, keep exploring!’.

— And so I zoomed in on relations in a couple as my brand’s concept, and it has been since, except that I’m no longer married.

What inspired your switch from advertising to fashion?

— My long search for myself in creativity. I’ve been drawing since I was little, and I love art, but I just couldn’t latch on. Mine is a story of a 30-something who finally finds her calling.

— You know when parents commit to their child’s ice-hockey practice or anything like that. The child, they insist, should be a professional ice-hockey player, all the while the child just wants to skate on ice for fun. I was like that with my then husband, but about fashion.

Subscribe now

— He has immaculate fashion taste, and I encouraged him to please become a fashion designer already! But a second class into my Master’s and I knew it was something for me. I wanted to become a fashion designer but didn’t believe I could be one. The fashion programme I got into was perfect for me, because they also kept room for non-fashion professionals like myself.

Veronika was the only one from her class who started her own brand as soon as she graduated. And she says it’s not because she’s a fearless person.

— I found myself in fashion, I wasn’t going to wait. It helped a lot that by then I’d made a name for myself as an advertising producer as well as an event organizer and now have enough work in those fields, which is what allowed and continues to fund CHERVONSKY. A fashion brand is the most expensive outlet for one’s creativity — maybe amongst your readers there will be a willing investor who’d take interest in what I do and back me!

I wish you nothing less!

She promised him not to wash her blue socks with his laundry, but she did it anyway. She said she won’t wear his jacket again, again. CHERVONSKY set forth in 2020 with Veronika’s graduation collection, EMPTY PROMISES, you know, those small everyday things women say but don’t do. Vogue Russia took notice and booked a dress from the collection for an editorial shoot. With a big smile on her face Veronika tells me the editors were amused to find out that the print on the dress was no watercolour abstract painting, as everyone thought, but her own blue socks that she folded, crumpled, and used the image of to make a unique print.

— It makes me proud that I manage to leave enough room for interpretation from season to season. For my second collection I looked at hair as a symbol of close ties between lovers (the myths of Samson and Delilah, of Theseus and Ariadne; and the love story of the explorer and geographer Przhevalsky and his beloved Tasya, who cut off her braid for him as a token of her love). I xeroxed my own hair on paper and used the resulting image to develop my signature hair prints in 3 hues — red, blonde and brunette. Once I presented the clothes, besides the hair people saw all sorts of things, fire, muscles, tree bark or even lilies. It’s so subjective!

Prints are one of CHERVONSKY’s calling cards, and getting ideas for them in unlikely places may as well be another, like noticing that fallen hair on her bathroom floor, or:

— I was in my kitchen, making borsch. I sliced into a piece of beetroot and stopped in my tracks, taken by its beauty. It was during the first Covid lockdown, there was a lot of time to notice small things like that around the house. I took a picture and excitedly sent it to my work group chat, to which someone suggested I needed company and fresh air. But I started playing with the image in PhotoShop, working towards a print that would later be a part of my fourth collection, BORSCH.

— I like to glorify the everyday and its chores. That’s definitely my thing.

Your goal as a fashion designer?

— To inspire people to discover and foster their own talents. I’m not that designer who started out young, I graduated with a degree in fashion at 31. It’s taken me years to figure it out, and I hope my story will be an inspiration to those on a similar journey now. What’s meant for you will be yours.

What drives your creativity, self-expression or being in service to others?

— I do it for self-expression. And at the same time my clothes may be providing others with the means for their own self-expression, so it goes together.

Do you have any touching stories about your customers?

— I don’t have my own retail space yet, my collections are on view in my apartment, which means many of my customers meet me in person for the first time in my home. They come for a scheduled 20-min appointment and often stay for an hours-long conversation over tea or coffee. I’m an open person and I find it touching that people get to see it, for many it comes as a pleasant surprise.

— My supervisor, the same Leo Alekseev, gave me a piece of advice I do not intend to forget. Stay true to your curiosity and playfulness, he said, because CHERVONSKY is an extension of me and my character.

Although CHERVONSKY received a good deal of media coverage after the launch, there was one publication that kept her waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more for a mention. The nerve!

— There is this common opinion amongst the young local designers about the lack of support from our fashion editors. When I just started I thought so too, and got upset. ‘Hey, but that’s not how PR works!’, a friend told me as I lamented. ‘Editors need time to follow your work first, no one will write about you the next day if you are a new name on the block. Put in the work first, and if it’s good, you’ll hear from them eventually.’ And I found it to be so true. The Blueprint is now my biggest cheerleader and supporter!

Indeed, half a year after the HAIR release, CHERVONSKY didn’t only get the desired mention, it got on the list of 100 most promising up-and-coming fashion designers in Russia according to The Blueprint, an esteemed and independent Russian-language publication on contemporary art and fashion.

To you, what defines a fashion brand’s success: profits or industry’s recognition?

— I think I’ll speak for a lot of niche, art-fashion brands if I say that success is not about the money for us. The recognition by the industry, that sort of validation is what keeps me going.

Your brand explores relations in a couple. What does being in a relationship mean to you personally? Is it a step closer to yourself or towards your partner?

— For a long time it had been about my then husband, I encouraged him to sing (he started singing opera and I helped produce his opera concerts), and as I already said, I wanted him to study fashion design (and I was going to help him produce his runway shows). But what I thought I wanted for him turned out to be what I wanted for myself and was afraid to admit. So eventually that relationship ended up bringing me closer to myself.

As a creative, coming up with new ideas is more exciting for Veronika than executing them. Execution is different, she says, it requires a solid skill or a set of skills. Her Master’s focused on conceptualising, and after graduating she caught up with the applied part by taking sewing and pattern-making courses, learning alongside industrious babushkas.

How big is your team?

— I don’t have one yet. I design and then work with the outside pattern-makers and seamstresses. But I’ve got a bunch of sweet, talented friends who give me a hand with production, from a photographer to a cameraman. I feel supported by the Moscow fashion community, as well as by the city of Moscow.

CHERVONSKY takes part in the Made In Moscow city initiative. Local brands are stocked free of charge across various locations around central Moscow, including one adjacent to the city’s landmark department store TSUM [the Russian Bergdorf Goodman, or Harrods.]

— As the brand’s founder and creative director I’m involved with everything, from drawing and design to communications to music, and I really love that about fashion, that it’s 360°view. I also produce all my fashion shows.

How would you describe contemporary fashion?

— Fireworks! There is so much going on right now, which is exciting! On the other hand, there is no singular style that could define fashion in recent decades, you know, like the 80s had their style, or the 50s.

Seems like a perfect moment now to ask Veronika about her own style and what she likes to wear, I have an inkling it will be something wild.

— It’s not unusual for me to have on a red bomber with bright blue florals, light pink bodysuit, and black pants with multi-colour florals. I often gather strangers’ smiles when they see what I wear, and I like that.

— I don’t have a uniform, I like to dress differently. One day it’s a print extravaganza, the next it’s a total black look, like your typical fashion designer. You know how many contemporary designers say they got into fashion because of John Galliano and his magic? Designer Maria Smirnova is my John Galliano. She’s my fashion mother, when I found out she was teaching a fashion Master’s, I applied right away. I will never not wear her clothes (INSHADE), colour, prints, everything I love!

— And yes, I wear CHERVONSKY, especially the outerwear, because I love a statement coat — and winter. As my favourite song from Frozen goes, ‘The cold never bothered me anyway’.

Do you have anything in your wardrobe that you’ll never want to part with?

— A vintage John Galliano men's jacket in faux leather. It has Galliano’s famous gazette print all over the lapels, and in the back a bull's head and sewing hooks. It’s so cool!

— You’ll recognise me by my long hair and my huge Ann Demeulmeester black leather platforms. Those things were impossible to wear when they were new — 2, maybe 3 kg each — and look at me now, walking in them around the house as if they were my slippers. I’ll have them till my old age, they are indestructible.

Have you always had your hair long?

— Yes, I’ve been a Rapunzel all my life, and a natural blonde.

Do you have any rituals to start a new day? Something you can’t do without?

— I used to love coffee and cacao, but recently switched to chicory with coconut cream. And I can’t have a day without a bath. I live in a small apartment and the bathroom takes up half of it, that’s how important it is to me. I haven’t had a guest yet who didn’t exclaim they hadn’t seen a bathroom this big before. A day when I can just keep taking a bath is a luxury to me, when nothing else is planned and I can fill up my bathtub, drain it when the water cools, fill it up again, drain again, all day like that. Yes, I do love water.

Since borscht is so omnipresent in Russian culture, this will be a fitting question. What is Russian culture to you?

— I’ll answer with a few word associations.

— The winter, a big part of Russian culture!

— Sincerity.

— The cinematography. Watch any Soviet movie for the first 5 minutes, and you’ll be reeled in to watch it till the end. Pity that Soviet film directors aren’t so widely known outside of Russia, except for a few big names.

Veronika is a cinema buff, and she’s got a collaboration to show for it. BRAT25 was CHERVONSKY’s third collection, a limited drop celebrating the 25th anniversary of Alexey Balabanov’s cult 1997 movie Brat (Russian for brother) and the sequel Brat 2, a story about an ex-conscript who gets involved with the mob through his criminal older brother. (Dazed magazine described Brat as ‘90s Russia’s answer to Trainspotting’.) The drop was an official collaboration between CHERVONSKY and the movie’s producer CTB Film Company. For the inspiration Veronika turned to the relationship between Brat’s main character Danila Bagrov and Dasha-Marilyn, a Russian prostitute in Chicago whose signature wear was a bob wig in black or green.

As a movie lover, could you recommend a non-fashion fashion movie?

—Yes, and it’s a series. I spent years associating myself with Carrie Bradshaw, until I watched the first episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. What Carrie Bradshaw, I’m Mrs Maisel, I’m that woman! Set in the 50s (great decade for style), it’s about a housewife who pursues a career in comedy after her marriage ends. The dialogue is great, the costumes. You gotta watch it, I’ll quiz you on it later.

I will! And one more question, what’s next for CHERVONSKY?

— I’m that person who first does and then talks about it. But as a teaser, 2025 will be the most musical year for CHERVONSKY yet.

That sounds like fun already!

Share

I look at my reflection in the mirror now and still, despite of what is presented to my eyes, I can hear a voice from the past:

— Fat!

A neighbourhood bully says to me as I walk past him and a bunch of younger boys on my way home from my grandparents. He looks me in the eye when he says it, and he says it with contempt, plainly, no laughter, which, to me, can only mean it’s true. When I get home, the first thing I do is rush to the mirror — Fat! My face burns. I feel so ashamed that I don’t even tell my parents about what’s happened. I knew I was a chubby child, well-fed, and I found it too embarrassing to repeat. One word.

Recently I came across Gabby Bernsteins’s latest book, Self Help, and after reading a few pages I was compelled, intrigued, to get a copy:

“We all carry unique defense mechanisms that show up whenever we feel triggered or activated by an external condition, situation, or person. These patterns have been developed over time as an effort to protect against unresolved emotional disturbance from our past…Our unconscious instinct is to avoid experiencing these intense emotions, leading us to take on various behavioural patterns to manage and suppress them.”

It’s astonishing that we’ll do whatever it takes not to come anywhere near an impermissible and repressed feeling and emotion, even if that means turning along the way to self-destructive and dysfunctional behaviours to be our protectors.

Let me tell you what had really happened. Fat! reached my brain faster than refined sugar, and there it was, the self-conscious new me. On the surface nothing would change yet, because at the age of 10 I didn’t think I could change anything about my body. But on the inside I felt like someone hit me with a burlap sack of potatoes — and that I looked like one too. I didn’t leave my house for a week.

As a child, when I heard the word ‘diet’ I always assumed it was a specific regimen devised by doctors to help with an ailment and aid convalescence. My grandmother, for instance, would talk about a diet during her weeks-long stay at a Soviet sanatorium resort every year, where next to it she would also be offered other health-boosting practices such as saunas, exercises, massages and mud baths. Diet then was not an unregulated, dangerous thing.

I can’t remember what glossy I started reading first when I grew a few years older. But that doesn’t matter, invariably all of them were touting the next best diet every month. Being on a diet seemed to me a part of being a woman, and if so, what is a better way to beauty, safety and acceptance than through thinness? I went on a diet. Growing thin was going to make me bully-proof.

Thinking back, the problem wasn’t even the bully and what he’d said that one time, the problem was that I believed him. I believed him — and that’s what I was going to see in the mirror ever since. That’s what eventually would make me spin for hours in the gym to burn off calories after eating one apple or even after drinking water. I was on my way both to body dysmorphia and an eating disorder. Now, can they be those destructive protection mechanisms Gabby Bernstein talks about in her book? Possibly. Who have they been protecting? A girl who is feeling helpless and secretly crying in her room after a bully called her fat. How is it possible? If I keep thinking my body looks inadequate I will force myself to lose more weight, if I lose more weight, no one ever will call me fat again. Here, ‘protected’.

My most acute bout of starving myself (which I never considered as starving, by the way) came to be during my first year abroad when I was 20, and when I flew back home my parents didn’t recognise me in the arrivals hall. My father didn’t cry or say much, but he kept buying me fresh bananas every day for a while. 20 years later, I’m no longer in the business of starving or wanting to starve myself, which is a big development, a win. But my relationship with my body image remains a work in progress, I still struggle, shortchange myself out of comfort to be and thrive in my own body. I may not be given to confidence in the same way Bianca Censori is, but I want to show myself a world in which a short hemline does not equate electrocution, because up till now it is exactly how my brain’s perceived it.

Maybe I should approach it as an actor would. I’ve read about the Michael Chekhov technique, and taken out of the realm of theatre and cinema I think it’s a useful approach to building confidence. The Chekhov method — Michael Chekhov (1891-1955) is a prominent Russian actor and director — is about creating a so-called psychological gesture, a movement or gesture that captures the essence of a character and is then executed inwardly by an actor to portray a character. Applied to my case, if I want to internalise a feeling of quiet confidence about my body image, I’ll start with harnessing its attributes first.

A no-pants look is nothing new. It started out as a form of dancewear in the 1950s US, when many dancers wore leotard over their tights to create a longer line. Sometimes they’d also wear shirts or sweaters on top, often belted for the right proportion. The trend picked up again in the 1980s, spearheaded by James Fonda of the aerobics fame. And while designers sent the look down the runway in each decade since the 80s, it landed in street style fashion only recently (thanks to Bella Hadid, Hailey Bieber, Kendall and Kylie Jenner amongst others). There are many variations on the theme (from shirts only to tighty-whities or briefs in general), but I’m going to stick with the one that swaps out traditional pants for tights, a style I learnt from Leandra and feel most comfortable trying now as my psychological gesture, daring and empowering.

If you’ve seen me at my day job as an artisanal bread baker, you’ll probably say, “But Anya, you are wearing sports leggings on the work floor, isn’t it similar to no pants?”. To which I’ll answer, “True, leggings do show the contour of one’s legs, but a no-pants look is different in that it’s about going deliberately against the norm.”

But I don’t want anything gimmicky. It has to be a look that I genuinely would be interested to wear, so my original idea of only pairing tights with a strong-shoulder blazer is no good. I notice the tights I bought for this are turning semi-opaque closer to the top, I can see my underwear in full and the blazer isn’t long enough to cover that up. This is not an outfit for me but a gimmick. No pun, but the look is incomplete.

Would a shirt or a sweater tied around my waist work ? No, looks bulky, funny under the blazer. Must I get a pair of cashmere knickers or hot pants then? No! Save for the tights (Swedish Stockings is a conscious brand!), I want to build the outfit with what I already have. My eyes fall on a wool shawl I’d brought with me from Russia when I moved. I’ve had it for so long the colour started to fade, but that’s fine, wrapped around and fastened by a brooch at my hips, you don't see a lot of it under the blazer, except for the fringe, which makes the outfit playful and more proportionate even. I see myself wear it IRL! In fact, I just asked a friend to meet me in town and make a few pictures of me wearing it. May it be another psychological gesture!

There is a cute video circulating on my Instagram feed. Of course it’s a cat video. In it a little kitten is being so angry it’s hissing, crying and trying to strike a cat who in turn keeps crawling nearer the kitten to socialise. The cat’s composure is remarkable, it doesn’t strike back or hiss. It takes many attempts to get close to the kitten, but eventually they both sit close to each other, almost snugging. It made me think that’s what healing from a trauma comes down to in general: awareness and patience. I will keep offering the bullied part of me my support and presence until that little girl feels she can finally let go of her defences and ease into being. She’s just too young to be able to see the whole picture.

PS. Dear Reader, there is now an option to upgrade your subscription to PEAR NOT BEAR to paid. If you enjoy reading my letters, please consider doing it. Your support will mean a lot, it will mean I’d be able to dedicate ever more time to PEAR NOT BEAR and its growth! Thank you!

Subscribe now