If you follow fashion, you probably already know the story of supermodel Lena Perminova. In case you don’t, here’s a summary: When she was a teenager, Perminova was facing six years in a Siberian prison for selling ecstasy at Russian nightclubs until her dad asked Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB operative turned billionaire, for his help in her case. He helped. And by the time she was 18, Perminova and Lebedev, 27 years her senior, had fallen in love—“A Cinderella Story,” was the Harper’s Bazaar headline. Twenty years later, Perminova is a mother of four, philanthropist, and world-renowned fashion influencer with 2.4 million Instagram followers—an “Insta-hero,” as Tatler magazine put it.
Other Russian models have followed a similar arc. Irina Shayk was heralded as “The Coal Miner’s Daughter” in the pages of VMan magazine, “going from life as a simple farm girl in nowhere, Russia to a global celebrity.” By “nowhere” they meant Emanjelinsk, a small village close to the Kazakhstan border, where Shayk planted potatoes in her garden until she was discovered one fateful day by a modeling scout; she became the first Russian woman to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue and later had a baby with Bradley Cooper. Natalia Vodianova’s incredible career trajectory—from selling fruit on the streets of the industrial city Nizhny Novgorod to becoming the face of Calvin Klein and marrying a British aristocrat, whom she has since divorced—earned her the nickname “Super Nova.” (Her star still burns bright; in 2020 she married Antoine Arnault, son of one of the richest men in Europe.) Sasha Pivovarova was an art student in Moscow who didn’t aspire to be part of the fashion industry until her photographer boyfriend (now husband) sent her picture to the modeling agency IMG, leading her to open the Prada show two weeks later. “It’s hard to imagine a more meteoric rise,” gushed the website The Fashionography.
But is it really? Since the early 2000s, when Vladimir Putin came to power and transferred vast quantities of wealth into the hands of loyal Kremlin-linked oligarchs, beautiful women from Russia and former Soviet bloc countries have been branded with a strikingly similar fairy-tale narrative, a Cinderella story featuring capitalism as Prince Charming. Strange as it may seem to think that there are “trends” in human beings, there was a moment in the early aughts—around the time that George W. Bush looked Putin in the eye and said he was able to “get a sense of his soul”—when it felt like fashion runways were a continuous parade of tall, thin, and steely eyed Russians with names like Vlada, Natasha, and Irina, following in the footsteps of Vodianova. At the same time, wealthy Russian shoppers began populating those exclusive front rows. By 2012, the New York Times Style section declared that “The Czarinas Are Back” in a piece about how Russians were becoming designers’ most important couture clients in a generation.
We are primed to devour these rags-to-riches stories because they seem ripped right from the pages of Russian literature. Who among us hasn’t been moved by the doomed passion of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, the ill-fated extravagance of Chekhov’s Lyubov Andreyevna, or the tragic sensuality of Dostoevsky’s Nastasya Filippovna? On TV, we were delighted by the seduction of beautiful KGB agent Elizabeth Jennings (Keri Russell) by the West on The Americans. Most recently, in The Great, Hulu’s comedic reinterpretation of the life of Catherine the Great, we scoffed at the debauchery of Imperial Russia while rooting for our heroine (Elle Fanning) to overthrow her drunken, boorish husband and unleash the ideas of the Enlightenment across the land.
On and off the fashion runways, the luxury-clad women were, in most cases, unwitting props in a narrative that put a glamorous spin on Putin’s global kleptocracy, allowing him to cultivate the image of a leader who was restoring Russia to its former glory, even as the money backing him was undermining democracies around the world.
The fetishization of Russian women extended beyond the fashion industry, of course. We need look no further than rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva, hailed by The Guardian as one of the “new Russian divas” in 2007. Raised in Tashkent, in northern Uzbekistan, Kabaeva was reportedly deemed to be “too fat” for gymnastics until a notoriously tough coach put her on what she has described as a near-starvation diet and an intense training regimen which earned her Olympic gold, the title of “Russia’s most flexible woman,” and following her retirement, a parliamentary seat in the State Duma and a reported $10 million-a-year job at the top of a pro-Kremlin media company. By 2011, she was on the cover of Russian Vogue wearing a gold Balmain gown and fending off continuing rumors that she was the girlfriend of Putin. These days, she is said to be holed up in a high-security Swiss chalet with her four children, believed to be fathered by Putin. (Putin consistently refuses to speak about his private life.)
When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February, Milan Fashion Week happened to be underway. As a result, runway models—both Russian and Ukrainian—were some of the earliest and most visible critics of the war. Ukrainian model Kristy Ponomar held a Prada bag as she gave Putin the middle finger in an Instagram post on the day of the invasion. Another Ukrainian model, Kateryna Zub, protested outside the Dolce & Gabbana show holding her country’s flag. Vodianova posted links to charities and wrote on her Instagram that “my heart goes out to all mothers who are suffering the consequences of recent events in Ukraine,” but was called out by commenters for not explicitly saying the word “war.” Shayk, in contrast, posted a peace sign and said, “No To War,” but closed the comments. Vlada Roslyakova, who identifies as a “Supermodel [and] Siberian princess in origin” on her Instagram account, posted a video of herself singing a Russian song. Perminova posted an all-black square on her grid with a broken-heart emoji, saying, in Russian, “WE WANT PEACE!!!!”
Some designers went out of their way in moving exhibitions out of solidarity with the Ukrainians. During Paris Fashion Week, the fashion house Balenciaga left blue and yellow T-shirts on the seats of every showgoer along with a heartfelt note from designer Demna Gvasalia, who became a refugee when he fled Georgia as a child. In Milan, Giorgio Armani turned off the music and had models walk in silence as “a sign of respect to people in the unfolding tragedy.” Ukrainian designer Dima Ievenko, of the brand Ienki Ienki, found himself stranded in Italy, just a day after he showed his fall-winter 2022 collection. In an interview with GQ, as he scrambled to help his 120 Kyiv-based employees, he said he felt that the industry wasn’t doing enough to acknowledge the enormity of the situation: “The largest country in Europe is under huge, violent attack from Russia, and still nobody knows and nobody cares.”
He had a point. The symbolic gestures of support were all taking place as luxury goods were largely left off of E.U.’s Russia sanctions. (They were added to the sanctions a couple of weeks later.)
As NATO countries work to seize yachts and untangle the international holdings of Putin-enabling oligarchs, the glamorous mythology is being punctured before our eyes. And Western democracies are discovering that the call is coming from inside the house.
When Evgeny Lebedev, whom Perminova jokes with about being his stepmother (even though he’s several years older than her), was elevated to Britain’s House of Lords in 2020 by Boris Johnson, despite reports that intelligence officials raised concerns that he might be a security risk, Lebedev posted a photo of himself in a crimson velvet robe decorated with white fur on Instagram: “Muzhik amongst the noblemen,” the caption said. Calling himself a “muzhik”—which is defined as a “Russian peasant”—was a bit of a stretch, but it was in keeping with the narrative that even the oligarchs like to attach to their personal biographies. (A recent profile in Town & Country featured the headline “The Dizzying Social Rise of Russian Scion Evgeny Lebedev.”)
Asked whether he had intervened to secure the lifetime peerage for Lebedev last week, Johnson denied it, arguing that the question “suits Putin’s agenda to try to characterize this as a struggle between the West and Russia.” His answer, perhaps unintentionally, revealed how entangled Western democracies are in Putin’s dirty money, how we’ve masked a sinister reality by telling ourselves these ridiculous fairy tales for way too long.
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