Politics of Luxury: The Burdens of Culture and Ideology in Sartorial Exchanges

In the early 2000s, the journey that took post-Soviet, newly wealthy Russians from a taste for the merely expensive to the rare-and-expensive produced a style which became known as ‘oligarch chic’. The term pointed towards the emblematic travel from the practices of haphazard conspicuous consumption to the acquisition of symbolically more complex expressions of luxury, and mapped the trajectory of the new economic capital possessed by the Russian super rich to a new symbolic capital of sophisticated luxury consumption transferred from the West.

Recently, some fashion practitioners providing from the ex-East, such as Demna Gvasalia, chief designer of both the fashion company Vetements and the Parisian fashion house Balenciaga, excelled in translating the Soviet ugly into a new western beautiful, and selling it at high prices, while simultaneously challenging notions of beauty, ugliness, banality, stereotypes and cultural appropriation.

This presentation explores these two very different types of sartorial exchange in the field of contemporary luxury in the context of their respective culturally and ideologically burdened references.