ONE OF the things a new visitor to Moscow notices first is the dirt. It’s everywhere: caked on the sides of cars, embedded in the cobblestones, a thin film on the windows of the buildings. It’s not the black soot of London and Paris, nor the blowing garbage of New York — this is country dirt, brown and fine as cinnamon.
No one at TsUM, the new European-style department store taking shape in a renovated building in the city centre, can explain where the dirt comes from. Not David Ward, the New York-based architect; not Vittorio Radice, the Italian retailing guru brought in to bring Western verve to the store; not even Alla Verber, its Russian fashion director, who has lived in Moscow since 1989. But although Verber can’t explain it, she knows what influence it has. It means that the floors in TsUM should not be the matte stone so popular in Western department stores. It’s too hard to keep looking clean. Instead the floor is highly polished.
The dirt also means that when Verber is on the lookout for stock, shoes are at the forefront of her mind. She buys some 19,000 pairs of shoes each season for TsUM — and it’s not to satisfy any strange national fetish.
“Shoes are the No 1 item for our country. We go through them quickly because of the snow and dust. It’s not for the style, but because they get really soiled,” she explains.
Yet when it comes to style, wealthy Muscovites are hardly slouches. On a recent and rare sunny day, young people could be seen emerging from the subway in high Prada heels and Seven jeans, and strolling into the Vogue Café wearing black Yves Saint Laurent dresses and clutching Hermès bags, even if the average salary in Russia is less than £100 a month. Watching it all from the back of her chauffer-driven BMW was Verber, the woman most responsible for bringing luxury and fashion to Russia.
Advertisement
As well as TsUM, Verber is also a vice-president of Mercury, the Russian group that has been opening luxury-brand fashion boutiques in Moscow since 1996. Thanks to her hard work, Gucci, Roberto Cavalli, Tod’s, Frette, Dolce & Gabbana and Armani are just some of the shops in which Moscow’s new mega-rich can be parted from their money.
As Russia’s economy continues to grow, so do the fashion needs of the people — and Mercury’s ambitions. In 2002 Mercury bought TsUM, one of the city’s two state-run department stores (the other, GUM, near the Kremlin, is now a high-end mall). The 377,000 sq ft store is undergoing a huge renovation. Gone, at least on the ground floor, are the fluorescent lights and standard office carpeting, in have come polished stone floors and corners populated by Bottega Veneta and Estée Lauder.
Upstairs are five more levels — all of which it is Verber’s job to fill. At TsUM she has room to do things she couldn’t with one-brand boutiques, and her aim is to ensure that a trendy girl in Moscow has the same wealth of choice as she would have in London.
“It’s hard to find something that hasn’t been snapped up by Alla,” says Anna Harvey, the woman in charge of launching foreign editions of Condé Nast magazines such as Glamour and Vogue. “She is probably the single most important buyer in the world right now.”
For Verber, whose family sent her out of Russia in 1979, when Jews were being granted exit visas, stocking a department store is more than making sales — it is trying to make up for years of deprivation. “Before, when you came to TsUM you would buy what you could get,” she says. “If they had red shoes, you got red shoes. Now, to come to one place and have such massive choice is exciting.”
Advertisement
Part of that excitement comes from bringing in British brands: she has already stocked TsUM with Matthew Williamson, Alexander McQueen and Luella.
According to Jonathan Akeroyd, the CEO of Alexander McQueen, the benefits of a strong image in Russia extend beyond the country’s borders. McQueen now has so many Russians shopping in Italy that it hires fluent Russian speakers to work in the Milan shop.
Paul Alger, executive director of the non-profit trade association U.K. Fashion Exports, says that the only surprise in Russia is the reluctance of some brands to expand there. “Paul Smith and Vivienne Westwood were not the trailblazers they were in the Far East,” he says. But in Verber’s view, the presence of the Brits is still important. “We are getting tired of Italian style,” she says. “The British show us something different.”
Tiring of Italian style, maybe, but not Italian management. In town on the same sunny day is the man helping to ensure that TsUM holds its own on a global scale — Radice. “Few projects around the world have the same spirit, power and excitement as TsUM,” says the man best known for injecting life into Selfridges. “It is a unique opportunity. TsUM will be an expression of Moscow lifestyle.”
For now, that doesn’t mean Cossacks coats and fur hats — unless they are made by Marc Jacobs. Radice and Verber happily wax lyrical about the possibilities of melding traditional Russian crafts with contemporary fashion, but the businessmen at Mercury are far more cynical. “A shirt with embroidery? Only tourists would buy that. And we don’t have so many,” says Alexander Reebok, Mercury’s general manager.
Advertisement
So for now, Radice and Verber are trying to match European standards to Russian needs. “The customer here has much more courage than the average European,” says Radice. Roughly translated, that means that they are happy to wear Comme des Garçons with Cavalli — a mix that would make any European fashionista squirm — and parade the results at any time of the day or night.
“Minimalism doesn’t work for us,” Verber explains. “When people come into a boutique and see no product, they get suspicious. They think things are being hidden from them.”
Outside TsUM, much of central Moscow is under reconstruction — which might explain some of the dirt. “Here the beauty is that everything is to be done,” says Radice, whose most recent project in Western Europe was the ill-fated launch of Marks & Spencer’s lifestyle furniture stores. “It’s great not to have a weight on your shoulders. If you make a mistake in an old economy, everyone complains Here there is an entrepreneurial spirit. Everybody is trying.”