25-year-old Gosha Rubchinsky’s spring/summer PDF is amazing. It throws together images of Moscow towerscape backdrops, street-cast Russian teens, changing rooms and athletic arenas. The designer’s sharply cut, minimal sportswear is juxtaposed with enough spikes and gothic script to hint at both the trance-loving hardnut skinhead proles and black metal-loving dropout stereotypes of Russian youth.

The whole thing ends with the words “Evil Empire”, Reagan’s Cold War description of the USSR. When I saw that I nearly came.

Rubchinsky is tapping into the male conscious on the street through sport, power, war and architecture. Of course there’s probably been a lot of nearly-cumming done by the menswear journalists who created Gosha Rubchinsky’s buzz. Pictures of roughneck Russians of military conscription age in sporty situations will do that to a fag.

Vice: When westerners think of Russian fashion, we tend to think vulgarity, decadence and excess, but you’re nothing like that.
Gosha Rubchinsky: I don’t pay much attention to what other fashion designers do, I’m not really into fashion like that. I’m trying to do something good for the kids born after the USSR collapsed in 1991. They are young and free, they don’t need diamonds, they’re the diamonds, it’s all on the inside.

Who are these kids you work with?
Street kids are all the same. There’s a coming together of the skateboarders and gang members. I’m trying to create a new aristocracy getting these kids educated out of thinking the worse they are, the better they are.

Are you working just in Moscow or the rest of Russia as well?
Moscow follows trends from the west, everything I do comes from the rest of Russia, it’s more wild.

What Russian artists and musicians inspires yours?

My friend and Gatecrasher DJ Mujuice. Boris Grebenshikov is a huge inspiration, he’s very spiritual musician in his fifties. Alexi Belyaev Gintovt is a very controversial nationalist artist, his opinions are wrong and he’s very right-wing, but his work is very strong.

What should westerners check out in Russia?
Moscow’s suburban night trains, full of kids travelling home after a night out. It’s really dangerous but worth the risk.

WORDS: DARYOUSH HAJ-NAJAFI

PICTURES: KIRILL SAVCHEKOV, IVAN KAYDASH, GOSHA RUBCHISKY, VIKTOR BOYKO