Mo’ Money, Mo’ Mustache

Local boy makes good! Denis Simachev debuted his 2008-2009 Cossack-inspired winter collection for the high-end hipster at Milan Fashion Week. The designer fell back on tried and true elements from his past collections — khokhloma folk print, sassy Cyrillic sloganing — and upped the ironic mustache factor like whoa.

Simachev shares his 'stache

A bit of mustache history: only pedophiles and Latvian men wore them prior to 2005, when they were co-opted by the international hipster movement. (As usual, Moscow’s a little slow on the uptake). But MDBIT says better late than never. The handlebar, the walrus, the Edgar Allan Poe — bring them all on!

Also coming soon to a Moscow near you: bow ties and man dresses!

Photos: fashiontime.ru

I Heart Hate Moscow

Everyone hates Moscow. Everyone except the people who just got here, with a degree in Russian History and a fresh copy of Dostoyevsky in their back pocket. And even they are beginning to realize that the waitresses are mean and it's hard to cross the street.

Non-Muscovite Russians really hate Moscow. My Russian expatriate friends think it unites the cruelty of feudalism with the foolish excesses of capitalism. Which is, like, so embarrassing on the world's stage. The soldiers in my cabin on the train back from Petrozavodsk hated Moscow because the people have no manners or heart (and they have better cell phones than them). "Moskva ne Rossiya! (Moscow isn't Russia!)," I learned. Then we returned to translating their ringtones. And while I am interested by Moscow, in the way I am interested in the carbuncle on my boyfriend's back, I most certainly do not heart it, because the girls are way prettier than me.

Happy New Year, bitches!

If you have spent significant time in Moscow and still think it rocks, you either a) were born here and don't know any better; b) are a Central Asian gastarbeiter living out your wild bachelor years while sending money back to your hovel; or c) are a bottom-feeding expat who couldn't get laid back in Johannesburg. And even the latter two will concede that their hometowns have much better food.

For that reason I'd like to direct our attention away from the great She-Bitch to Norilsk, the northernmost city in Siberia, formerly a slave labor camp and recently named one of the Top Ten Most Polluted Places in the World. (Life just kept getting better!) The entire city is dying from toxins kicked up by the factories of Norilsk Nikel, owned by Russian brazillionaire Mikhail Prokhorov (who is also known for the minor international escandalo of flying planeloads of prositutes into French ski resort Courchevel). But even freezing, atrophied little Norilsk knows how to party. These are from the New year's Eve Bash at "Tornado." We're not in Moscow anymore, Toto.

Fuck dropping $400 on cocktails at a shitty Moscow club. In Norilsk, $20 buys you enough Sovetskoe Shampanskoe to kill a horse

One boy and one girl for every able-bodied man in Norilsk!

Grease your hair back, unbutton your shirt and pump your fist in the air, because you ARE the life of the party, Mr. Sparkles

Yes! I've searched for months for a photo of one of these in the wild: the provincial male "all bangs" 'do! I thought it went extinct in 2003. I see you, brother!

Shaving squigglies onto your scalp? Also still cool

Unfortunately, other Moscow hair fads have contimated Norlisk like so much nickel and arsenic in the air

And the girls are still smokin' hot. I guess nowhere's perfect

The best part of getting outside Moscow? No feis kontrol!

Photos: Geometria.ru

Saty-Rai-con

I’m trying to shake the winter doldrums by looking at photos from Rai, which takes it back. Waaaay back. Pagan, naked, super-camp — humankind hasn’t partied this degenerately since 99 AD.


Fellini couldn’t make this shit up. Drenched with sexual juices, rolling in glitter, Rai is a terrifying glimpse into the ancient depravity that exists in each and every one of us, if we can just get past face control.


Somewhere between heaven and hell, this Rai, although last weekend’s inclusion of Boy George tipped the scales towards the latter. Who better to take part in the pre-Christian orgiastic fury than a man recently charged with false imprisonment of a male hustler. If Rai could get R. Kelly up in there, it would be quite an interesting afternoon.

Doesn’t promoter Andreas look like a fun-size Caligula? Doesn’t he just?

Close the window! Go back to from whence you came! Once you realize there’s a place on earth you can indulge every perverse fantasy, including bug-eye sunglasses, you can never feel pleasure again!


Enough. I’m nauseous of boobs and lasers.

Photos: geometria.ru

I Less Than Three DJ Anton Ms

In the tradition of MDBIT half-heartedly stalking bizarrely coiffed fashion queens, let me introduce DJ Anton M, who is certainly no Danila, but turns up on this website so often I am proud to finally get an ID on him.


Lurking in the background of every high-fashion event, Anton M stands out for his aggressively asymmetric bangs, ambiguous sexuality and little Asian dudeness.

Laying down the beats at Solyanka

Laying down the beats at a children’s furniture exhibit opening

This is a man who has spun everywhere from East Moscow to Ukraine, from the opening of TopShop in Yevropeisky Mall to some party at Respublica bookstore. Named Harper Bazaar Russia’s “Most Fashionable DJ in Moscow,” still Anton maintains, “I’m not a DJ, I just play music my friends like.”

Photos: anton.m.pdj.ru, geometria

Suck an Egg! MDBIT in MT

Some at the Moscow Times are, like me, fascinated by the dizzying highs of Moscow at play. The holiday season brings in a special wave of short bus-riding elitny ridiculousness: corporate parties. Since it's already mid-December, people have left for the holidays and no one is paying attention to what's going in the paper anyway, I was able to make my debut as an authoritative nightlife anthropologist correspondent.

Na, kartoshka:

"Companies skimp on health benefits, toilet paper and coffee creamer for an entire year for the ultimate holiday blow-out," nightlife blogger Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears, or MDBIT, said in an e-mail interview. She declined to give her real name because she said a corporation owns her and could easily withhold her lunchtime blogging privileges.

Companies are also willing to pay top dollar to bring a famous face to a party. "They don't do much more besides smile confusedly and pose for photo ops," the nightlife blogger, MDBIT, said in e-mailed comments.

"Remember Gwyneth Paltrow? Academy Award-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow? Martini paid to have her in a cage at one of its parties" MDBIT wrote. "If Moscow history has taught us anything, it's that anyone can be bought."

"The presence of a celebrity validates the affair under the principle that if you throw enough money at something, it becomes truth," MDBIT wrote. "Also, it's a middle finger to the rest of civilization: 'We OWN you, bitches!'"

For the record, it was a Facebook, not email, interview, but the AP style guide doesn’t yet accommodate that medium.

The big news of this season is that Oleg Deripaska rented Rihanna for a Russian Aluminum party, and invited fellow brazillionaire Roman Abramovich. Actually, Tvoi Den put it better: “Deripaska Gives Black Woman as Present to Abramovich for $500,000.” Ah, oligarch love.

All for you, Roma: Rihanna performs at Club XIII

Back on earth, corporate parties are less about human trafficking, more about scamming halyava (free shit), especially alcohol. I am told it is the case with corporate parties the world over, but for reals, everyone at my corporate party was dry-hump-the-secretary, put-on-an-afro-and-pull-a-nylon-over-your-head-“Look-I’m-black”-dance drunk.

Here are some poor Russian’s corporate party photos, because I didn't take any of my own. But it looked pretty much the same, down to Igor filming it all for Monday morning retribution.

Photos: Tden.ru, picasaweb.google.com/Filimonenkow

Fashism

Youth brigade Nashi held a fashion show by Red Square to drum up interest in the Putin 4-Eva movement. After all, nothing says slavish devotion like stripping down to your panties in sub-zero weather.

Vova, my crotch is with you. The dark gas elf is too short to lead!

Thanks to Scraps of Moscow for the tip-sky.

Photos: goblin-gaga.livejournal.com, yagoda-kalina.livejournal.com

Mittens Are for Estonians

Rasha is effin’ cold. Plus, there are plenty of other things to worry about (maintaining nation’s birthrate, getting a table at Rai, not being eaten by bears.) For these reasons, little sway is given to the concerns of Western animal rights activists.


The annual “Fire & Ice” fashion event shows “what’s up” in the world of fur and leather. I’m posting photos from last year’s event because they’re much more fantastische. Also because I remembered seeing them back then and feeling a peculiar swell of emotion then ultimately resulted in the creation of this blog.

Nothing comes between me and my mink flapper dress.

Screw You, PETA.

Of course, you have to come to “Ice & Fire” swinging your biggest fur accessories.


But if you really want to know what captured my heart, and sent me down the path to Moscow nightlife anthropology blogging, it was the fellow above. He had me at jewel-encrusted eye-patch.

Photos: elite.ru

Burnt by the Sun and City

I’m scabbing my own strike. If there’s one person out there who wants to know about Moscow’s fabulously retarded nightlife, then I guess that’s enough. Especially since I found a crop of party photos that need to be released into the wild: “Sun and City” at club Opera.


Just when you start posting things like “Moscow is becoming cool” and new oligarch club The MOST uses its “no skanks” policy as a selling point, something happens to make you realize it was all smoke and mirrors. Moscow is still Mars, Moscow is still Hell, Moscow still wears sunglasses at night.

Opera, fashioned as elitny hip hop megaclub, is in itself inherently ridiculous, but coupled with “Sun and City,” it provided a lens of uniquely fabulous retardedness through which to view the city. Sun and City is a poplar solarium. Hell, I’ve been there. Tanning is something dangerous for your health you have to do in Moscow to fit in, like driving without a seatbelt and having unprotected sex.


But indoor sunglasses? Let me just jump in my spaceship.


Note use of blackface and black people as promo for a solarium.

That’s really tan!

The remainder of the photo series is just called, "When You Were Leaving The House Tonight, Girl, Someone Lied to You.”

Girl.

Someone.

Lied.

To YOU!

Opera, 6 Trekhgorny Val., Metro: Barrikadnaya, Tel. 205-9822

Photos: mainpeople.ru