Fashion from the “Voientorg” era
March 21 marked the conclusion of the first Ukrainian Fashion Week that united two well known events, Fashion Seasons and the Kyiv Catwalk Festival. There’s no doubt about it: this combination was a success. We will discuss the results and lessons of the Fashion Week in our upcoming issues.
Today I want to talk about a collection that served as a sparkling final chord. The designer Viktoria Hres has not taken part in any mass fashion projects for the past several years, preferring her own independent style. This time she decided to show her collection “Autumn-Winter 2006-2007” VOIENTORG.
Don’t be alarmed; none of the monstrosities from the Soviet past were shown on the catwalk. Hres explains her chosen theme: “Who among all those people born in the 1980s would ever have imagined that a female image was always hidden behind the ascetic name of the Soviet chain of stores called Voientorg? During this period real ladies of the 1970s sought to buy soft leather gloves and purses from the German Democratic Republic, genuine French perfumes, and, if they were lucky, Austrian boots with their famous handmade boot trees.
“Wives of Soviet military officers, faithfully following their dedicated spouses posted from one backwater town to the next across the boundless Soviet expanses, could stay attractive thanks to the retail stores on Soviet military bases — and they instilled a taste for good quality in their daughters, who were growing up too fast. It was the age of the voientorgs, an unexpected gift of the times: holding mom’s hand clad in a soft glove, with ever-charming dad in his military uniform, who was the envy of all your admiring friends.” The designer dedicated her collection to that man in uniform.
The fashion show began to the accompaniment of cheerful melodies of popular songs from the 1980s. But the soundtrack was not the only thing that carried us back to those years. Hres uses lots of easily recognizable designs and motifs. They are readily identifiable, but from what I remember no one wore such noble, stylish, feminine, and attractive designs.
Hres’s fabrics include gorgeous knitwear, chiffon, silk, velvet (much of it finished by hand), and knitted and woven fur. Her designs are both original and trendsetting. The most fashionable colors were black, white, and gray. Pleated skirts, “flashlight” sleeves, high waists are very hot now and a far cry from everything else that was shown during Fashion Week.
Part of Hres’s collection includes another clothing line known as “Victoria Gres by GRES” [more often than not Ukrainian designers and businesspeople use Russian transliteration— Transl.] which consists of no more than 20 copies of each design produced in four sizes.
Hres, one of only a handful of Ukrainian fashion designers, has succeeded in reaching the goal behind all these fashion weeks: designing clothing that women will actually wear.
