Interested in finding out about the fever gripping 10 million voracious Muscovites, about the trash culture cultivated there, and about fashion in the Soviet Union, and today’s Russia? Then stop by fashion anarchist Petlura’s unorthodox cellar abode on the premises of an Orthodox monastery in downtown Moscow. The garment king of the underground reigns supreme here, amidst some 45,000 garments and objects. He stopped counting them long ago, he admits, these treasures of everyday culture and fashion in Russia he has been collecting for over twenty years in raids on Moscow’s flea markets and by rummaging in trash dumpsters.
Behind a collection of crutches once used by long-dead Red Army veterans, there are kilos of colorful garments with flower-, rocket- or tractor-patterns from the Stalin to Brezhnev eras stacked up in perforated plastic sacks. The garment racks are crammed with brown school uniforms decorated with their typically exchangeable white collars. The entire Soviet Union attended school wearing these uniforms until the early 1990s. Hanging behind a stuffed horse - retrieved from the props department of the Bolshoi Theater - is Petlura’s prize piece: the space suit of a MIR cosmonaut. Next to it is an outfit for a kolkhoz worker, made for eternity and for the fulfillment of the Five Year Plan. Right beside it is an invaluable one-of-a-kind specimen from recent Russian fashion history: an imitation jeans jacket, presumably the pride and joy of the young Russian who once owned it. This status symbol’s former holder covered it with sewn-on labels in a Western manner: a badge from the 26th Party Congress of the Soviet Union shines forth next to sports badges from the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. A touching memento to an era when capitalism was already knocking at the door.
Back in the mid-1980s, years before the advent of capitalism, the Ukrainian Petlura (born in 1955) was staging hot rock festivals, bizarre art and fashion performances in Moscow, and was creating his own fashion collections by utilizing flea market garments. In 1989 he founded the alternative Free Academy of Moscow, an artist commune that squatted for five years in the capital’s house of culture as the center of the independent art scene.
