Slava Zaitsev, Staltwart of Russian Fashion, Dies at 85
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Russian couturier Vyacheslav “Slava” Zaitsev, who went from leading Soviet designer to father of Russian couture, died on April 30 near Moscow at age 85.
His death was revealed on Sunday by Russian media outlets and confirmed by long-term friend Evelina Khromtchenko.
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The designer had gone to the hospital earlier in the day due to abdominal discomfort and later died in the intensive care unit, according to fashion editor and former model and friend Tatiana Sorokko. Plans for a memorial service for the Moscow-based designer have not yet been finalized.
“He gave hope to women in the Soviet Union that through fashion and looking good they could aspire to other things and overcome the hardships of everyday life. He was that voice for generations of Russians who want to look to the West to see a better future,” Sorokko said. “He left us today, when there is no future in Russia.”
Remembered as a stalwart of Russian fashion since Soviet times, Zaitsev opened the Slava Zaitsev fashion label in 1982 in Moscow and was best known for dramatic, colorful designs that tapped into his country’s folkloric heritage and traditional garments.
In addition to his ready-to-wear and couture businesses, he designed film and ballet costumes as well as outfits for the Russian Olympic team and the Moscow police. He also dressed the wives of Soviet and Russian leaders.
“Thanks to you, the concept of ‘Russian style’ has become more obvious in international fashion, and the very concept of ‘fashion’ has not died in the totalitarian U.S.S.R.,” said Khromtchenko, a fashion expert who served as editor in chief of the Russian edition of L’Officiel magazine.
Aside from Zaitsev’s sense of humor, he would want to be remembered for his “incredible voice” and being “absolute fun to be with that,” Sorokko said. That sunny-side-up personality was despite a trying upbringing.
Although the Kyiv-born fashion designer Helen Yarmak was not part of Zaitsev’s generation, she said, “I respected him very much because he was the first [modern-day Russian] designer.”
His style of contemporary design did not exist until he created them, she said. “Before him, that kind of fashion did not exist. It did before the revolution,” said Yarmak, who runs her signature business from New York and Miami. “He started to use Russian fabrics. Before that, everybody looked like they were in uniform. Everybody looked the same due to socialism. He was a pioneer because he created his own style from Russian textiles for the Russian public.”
The Russian Fashion Blog’s founder Julia Dale said Zaitsev’s influence on Russian fashion “cannot be overestimated, especially given that a large part of his work was carried out during the times of censorship. When even the words “glamorous” and “chic” had a negative connotation, Zaitsev’s extravagant designs managed to strike a delicate balance between amazing and shocking.”
She continued, “Still, Zaitsev created for the woman who is proud to be Russian. By incorporating elements of traditional Russian costume and folk art into his designs, he redefined Russian style and helped it depart from the drab, utilitarian post-war clothing.”
In doing so, Zaitsev’s designs showed that clothes can be worn not just for practical purposes, but also as a form of self-expression, which was “something Soviet women were desperately craving back then.” Dore said His prolific talent inspired many contemporary designers and remains a constant presence in modern Russia,” Dale said.
Born on March 2, 1938, in Ivanovo, a city 155 miles northeast of Moscow, Zaitsev grew up in a modest family, raised by his mother who supported the family by working several jobs, including as a cleaning lady and laundress, after his father was swept up by the political purge orchestrated by then-Soviet general secretary Joseph Stalin.
“But he always had a dream and looked at life through rose-colored glasses. And he gave that enthusiasm to so many people in Russia to overcome the hardship,” she continued. “Those bridges that were built with such love are now all destroyed.”
While his initial ambitions were thwarted due to his father’s imprisonment, he went on to study applied arts at a local university before moving to Moscow, where he enrolled in the Moscow Textile Institute.
After his 1962 graduation, he was hired as a womenswear designer in a factory near Moscow. According to his biography, Zaitsev’s first collection featuring traditional colorful floral motifs landed him in hot water as it was considered too frivolous and contrary to Soviet ideals.
According to French and Russian media, a mid-1960s encounter with the likes of Pierre Cardin, Guy Laroche and Marc Bohan saw Zaitsev dubbed the “Red Dior” by French weekly magazine Paris Match. In addition to Cardin, his designer friends included Donna Karan, Oscar de la Renta and Jean-Louis Scherrer, among others.
Although most of his career was restricted to the former Soviet bloc, a 1987 licensing agreement saw Zaitsev’s designs launching on the U.S. market through an agreement between the Soviet Ministry of Licensing and Intertorg Inc., a Sacramento, California-based company specialized in industrial trade activities between the two countries.
At the time, Zaitsev was the leading designer for Dom Modi, a Moscow fashion house that dressed Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Later that year, the licensed line of suits, coats and eveningwear made its debut in New York, with Zaitsev keen to show Russia’s “tremendous fashion potential” and tap into similarities between Russian and American design aims, such as a shared love of sportswear.
His designs were described as “dramatic” by Bloomingdale’s but retailers considered them “out of the mainstream of fashion,” with asymmetrically closed wool coats, layered looks and “tricky trompe-l’oeil dresses that looked like suits.”
In 1992, he was considered the most commercially successful Russian fashion designer and he launched the Maroussia by Slava Zaitsev scent with L’Oréal, Russia’s first designer perfume and “irrefutable evidence that communism really is dead,” according to WWD reports at the time.
At the invitation of Carven, Zaitsev showed a “Les Saisons Russes” couture collection in Paris in 1988, according to the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode, French fashion’s governing body.
Between 2007 and 2009, he also served as a judge on the “Fashion Sentence” TV show, where stylists would compete by giving makeovers to members of the public.
A retrospective of his fashion work was shown in 2016 at the State Hermitage Museum in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. In parallel to his fashion career, Zaitsev was also a noted painter and artist, with his work exhibited outside his homeland.
“Nowadays being able to draw is almost not necessary for young fashion designers starting in the business because they come from the point of draping. He knew how to draw so well that he had several exhibitions in the United States in the 1990s that were very well-received,” Sorokko continued.
Though considered among the most influential Russian designers — along with Valentin Yudashkin, who is considered his pupil — Zaitsev seemed uninterested in the international market, telling WWD in 2008 that he thought that “as a Russian artist, [he] should show in Russia.”
“At the beginning of the 1990s, I had the chance to show in Paris, and I realized that it’s not my place,” he said.
— With contributions from Rosemary Feitelberg (New York)
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