NOTE: These two items are actually unrelated, I just figured I’d kill two fashion birds with one post.
Stargate Outfits:
Watching Hulu’s recommended shows scroll by, it suddenly dawned on me that the outfits that the cast of Startgate: Atlantis are wearing in the promo shot look incredibly familiar:
Particularly the leather jacket, second from left…
Reminded me a lot of a design my friends at Skin.Graft made a few years back, called the Darrah jacket:
Checking out other Stargate outfits…
…the jackets look a lot like designs from the newer Skin.Graft collection:
Oh, and then, of course, there’s the dreddy dude…
Who’s, like, a look-book unto himself of the de rigeur, reconstructed, burningman aesthetic…
I’ve been seeing the girls’ version of the style creep up in various ways before. Nice to see the guys’ fashion getting adopted too.
Moving on…
Russian Hats:
I first noticed this last Summer, in a spread in Vogue’s 2008 Supplement, “Fashion Rocks,” featuring Dhani Harrison and Sasha Pivovarova:
It’s not every day you come across an Alexander McQueen-ed version of the particular kind of hat that is one of the hallmarks of your childhood, so it definitely stood out. But Summer is not exactly fox-fur hat season, so I had to wait till winter hit to see this trend in full swing. At Lucent L’amour, a couple of weekends ago, I must have seen a dozen people sporting Russian hats. Since it was an outdoor music festival in the middle of February, it was definitely a practical accessory. Cavalli has been making Russian “folk”-inspired Jackets for years. These below are from Fall 2005:
By last Summer, it seems fashion designers from Dolce & Gabbana, to Anna Sui, to Temperley London had all taken their inspiration from traditional Russian costumes, and military Cossack outfits. In response to my joking that “Russian hats are the new Fedoras,” Katie Kay, one of the partners at Skin.Graft, who was just at the fashion trade-show, MAGIC, this past week, tweeted:
I’m wondering if this might be the beginning of a larger trend of Western adoption of traditional Russian styles. Perhaps it’s been long enough now since the collapse of the Soviet Union that the younger generations have been able to rediscover an authentic cultural heritage that was pretty much erased from the social radar during the USSR era. Now, as individual expression and fashionability supplant the last remnants of communist conformity, Russian folk styles may offer a hidden trove of aesthetic inspiration.
Will Russian Orthodox iconography, or traditional Finift Jewelry will be next?
