Freeze and Rewind

I feel incredibly bourgeois with what I'm about to say but I'm just going to put it out there.  My Russian cleaner who's hoovering around me at the moment, promptly reminded me that I need to release these designer pigeon posts into the big internet wild.  No, I'm not Richie Rich and no, I don't employ a cleaner on a regular basis.  I'm actually in fear of passing whatever lurgie bug that has attacked Steve and myself, so I needed a proper helping hand in bleaching the shit out of the apartment.  She speaks no English and she frowns at all my home misdemeanours – e.g. my crappy little duster buster.  I kinda love her.  

In any case, it could just be my illin' state but the chill has properly set in now in London and I'm actually running with glee to huddle besides the radiator.  The last time I remember feeling this level of chill was back in April in Moscow when I went to check out Cycles and Seasons, one of many fashion weeks/events that the city plays host to.   

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I'm therefore rewinding to one weird day during that week, when we had had enough of the the fake gilded walls of our Stalinist "Seven Sisters" hotel.  We headed out of the city centre to the refreshingly and I suspect, purposefully bleak apartment of Anna Shestakova where we'd be introduced to a decidedly alternative wave of fashion going on in Moscow.  I say the word "alternative" with genuine feeling given that Russian fashion in comparison to countries like France is still relatively young and so a reaction to the establishment can still be distinguished.  

Together with her friend Artur Lomakin, the designer of label Forget Me Not, they create, photograph and experiment with clothes in an entirely purist way without any particular strategy or convention.  It's difficult to say the words "without convention" and really mean it these days.  Truly though, in that Krushchevian apartment building with the scraped back walls and flutters of magazine images and a bare mattress on the floor, nothing felt like a deliberate affectation.  We sat on the floor, drank apple and vodka, ate pasta whilst we watched a series of films that Anna had made for her own on and off label Chaos Reigns, projected on to a white sheet hanging up on the wall.  Am I starting to sound like I'm setting the scene for a Lukas Moodysson film?  

It would be the first time someone has ever presented me with the DIY gift of a blank brown paper sketchbook.  I've still not filled it up with anything meaningful yet other than the odd tear or two.  I fear I've let Artur and Anna down… 

As for discernable clothing, it is Artur's Forget Me Not label, which lives on a constantly in-flux Tumblr blog, that has caught a few eyes already with its weathered and raw aesthetic.  Anna is often Artur's model and together they present an irregular flow of patchworked pieces that catch the eye with earthy textures and deconstructed silhouette.  The Tumblr blog gets updated with pieces that are for sale every now and again at more than reasonable prices.  It's not a label that spoon feeds you a ton of information.  I'm not even sure Artur and Anna would call what they do a "proper" fashion label but that afternoon certainly lingered in my mind, enough for the aptly named Forget Me Not to surface months and months later.  On that basis, I guess throwing convention out of the window is working for them on some level.  I'm also going to go out on a stalker-ish limb and say that Artur's (public) Facebook wall photo page is an intriguing set of imagery that goes hand in hand with that cold cold afternoon as well as his clothing designs.    

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Sticking to the Eastern Bloc theme, I dug up a little email exchange between Ukrainian designer Anna October (October Revolution is surely an article title in waiting for this designer…) and I.  I first saw her knitwear pieces popping up on the online store of RA in Antwerp (now handily on Far Fetch).  I can always count on the RA owners to scout out interesting designers for their nook-and-cranny haven in Antwerp.  There was also something a little strange about the look book presentation of this A/W 11-12 collection.  It reminds me of my point-and-shoot, in-the-bedroom days of blogging and clearly the look book style ties in with the slightly naive style in clothing, which is laden with nostalgia.  Nans knitting jumpers for their grandchildren immediately come to mind.