Le chic oligarchique et le principe de l’excès (Oligarch Chic and the Principle of Excess)

The journey that took the post-Soviet newly rich Russians from a merely-expensive to a rare-and-expensive object became known as ‘oligarch chic’. In this essay, Bartlett explores its emblematic travel from the practices of haphazard conspicuous consumption to the acquisition of symbolically more complex expressions of luxury. Analyzing the efforts of Russian edition of Vogue, as well as other relevant Russian media accounts, to connect the new economic capital possessed by the Russian super rich with a new symbolic capital of sophisticated luxury consumption transferred from the West, Bartlett exposes a set of different facets of the new Russian luxury and its consumers.

• Organisation