Ульяна Сергеенко: «До сих пор не понимаю, почему одним людям можно употреблять это слово, а другим — нет»

Дизайнер дала первое интервью после скандала на Неделе высокой моды в Париже.

Если честно, я до сих пор не понимаю, почему одним людям можно употреблять это слово, а другим нет», — говорит в интервью The Times дизайнер Ульяна Сергеенко. Речь идет о большом скандале, который случился во время Недели высокой моды в Париже. Ульяна отправила открытку своей подруге Мирославе Думе с подписью "to my n####z in Paris", Мирослава выложила ее в сториз. Первой отреагировала Наоми Кэмпбелл — ей фраза показалась оскорбительной, несмотря на то, что это прямая цитата из песни Канье Уэста. Сергеенко и Думу осудили, обе извинились. Tatler тогда предложил список мер по спасению репутации от лучших пиарщиков Москвы.

«Я большой фанат Канье, — рассказывает Ульяна. — Я не имела в виду ничего плохого. Я имела в виду «моя банда». Теперь я понимаю, что лучше никогда не употреблять это слово. Но когда я росла в Советском союзе, все так говорили. Так писали в наших учебниках. Это было разрешенное слово». Что касается «банды», или the tsarinas, как раньше называли русских красавиц стритстайла Сергеенко, Думу и Перминову, Ульяна вспомнила, что они чувствовали себя «как будто в популярном бойз-бенде», когда за ними охотились все фотографы на улице. 

«Я глубоко сожалею, если кого-то обидела, — продолжает Ульяна. — Это была цитата из моей любимой песни». Ее бизнес-партнер Фрол Буримский добавляет: «Мы поступили глупо. Если мы собираемся быть здесь (на Западе, — прим. The Times), нам нужно понимать такие вещи». 

Ульяна также рассказала в интервью о том, как познакомилась с бывшим мужем Данилом Хачатуровым, экс-президентом группы компаний «Росгосстрах», в очереди к стоматологу. (В декабрьском номере Tatler Сергеенко подробно рассказала об этих отношениях, которые подошли к концу). А еще многое о своем прошлом: как перекраивала вещи еще в школе, плакала и мечтала об «Адидасе» и выменяла бабушкины серьги на джинсы, которые оказались подделкой. 

ДОБАВЛЮ ОРИГИНАЛ 

Ulyana Sergeenko: the oligarch’s ex-wife who changed the way Russians dress

It was her Russian billionaire husband who helped set up her label. But last month at Paris couture it was Ulyana Sergeenko’s racist comment that made the headlines. Anna Murphy meets her

Anna Murphy

February 17 2018, 12:01am, The Times

Ulyana Sergeenko, 36, photographed in Place Vendôme in Paris last month

Ulyana Sergeenko, 36, photographed in Place Vendôme in Paris last monthROBERTO FRANKENBURG

I am sitting in a sumptuous salon overlooking that most sumptuous of Parisian addresses, Place Vendôme. Before me, a porcelain doll of a woman, dressed in a five-figure couture dress, perches on the edge of a Louis XV chair, a diagonal of bare leg just so.

How very, very Couture Week. Except the conversation is anything but. I was supposed to be meeting Ulyana Sergeenko, a 36-year-old Russian former supershopper turned couturier, to talk about extremely expensive clothes and the women who buy them. That, after all, is what couture week is about. But last month’s event became about something else, thanks to an Instagram furore surrounding Sergeenko and her friend, fellow Russian supershopper Miroslava Duma.

It started with a large bunch of roses that…

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It started with a large bunch of roses that the former sent the latter. Or rather the note that she sent with it: “To my n***as in Paris.” Duma, a fashion tech investor and media entrepreneur, posted a picture of both and social media blew up, especially when old video footage surfaced of Duma expressing homophobic views. Both women later apologised, but the damage was done.

With Miroslava Duma, 2016

With Miroslava Duma, 2016GETTY IMAGES

Sergeenko gets it now, but is eager to explain why she didn’t earlier in the week. The phrase was a reference to a 2011 Kanye West and Jay-Z song, and to a Kanye concert that she and Duma attended in the French capital three years ago. “I am a huge Kanye fan,” she says, as saucer-eyed as a Margaret Keane waif. “I didn’t mean anything bad by it. I just meant ‘my gang’. Now I understand you should never use this word, but growing up in the Soviet Union everyone used it. It was in our school books. It was the official word.”

Today she is apologetic – “I am deeply sorry if I hurt anyone” – and still a tad confused. “It was a quote from a song that I love,” she continues. “And to be frank, I still do not understand why some people can use this word and others can’t.” But, as her business partner, Frol Burimskiy, interjects from a nearby gilt sofa, “We have been stupid. If we’re going to be here [in the West], we have to understand these things.” Less helpful is his later assertion that Sergeenko, due to her love of rap music and rapper fashion, is “the blackest person in Russia”.

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It’s another bum note that is, I think, innocently meant. “Ulyana loves the whole rap culture with all of her heart,” he says.

Indeed. Sergeenko has met Kanye, and she has dressed Kim. (Along with everyone from Rihanna – “A dream come true” – to Beyoncé.) But her obsession apparently goes further than that. “Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think about who I want to dress like the next day,” she says. One regular muse is, not surprisingly, Anna Karenina. “But it is not necessarily a woman.” Two more favourites are, she tells me, Kanye and British grime artist Skepta. “I love dressing like a rapper,” she says. “I love Kanye’s clothes.” Then there’s Michael Jackson. “Those gloves!”

With Natalia Vodianova and Frol Burimskiy

With Natalia Vodianova and Frol BurimskiyGETTY IMAGES

It no doubt goes without saying that Sergeenko’s approach to getting dressed is not like ours. It was her baroque and peculiarly Russian sense of theatre – part-Romanov, part-muzhik – that first got her noticed in fashion land, when she started attending the shows in 2008. The freshly minted (and how very minted) wife of a $2 billion oligarch, she was immediately picked up by street-style photographers for her idiosyncratic fancy dress.

“At first it was seen as ridiculous, what I wore,” she recalls, “but then something changed. People’s perceptions changed.” She and the group of super-rich Russian women of which she formed a part – that “gang” of hers, Duma among them – were nicknamed “the tsarinas”. It was all change for the Kazakh-born daughter of a ceramics factory manager and an English teacher, who had grown up in a modest apartment. “We felt like we were in a boy band.”

We have been stupid. If we are to be in the West we have to understand these things

She cried at her first couture show. “It was like a dream, the kind of dresses I had been dreaming of since I was a child.” And then she shopped. “For a few years I was a shopaholic. I was buying everything. I was wild. I needed all the things in the world.” She had the means to acquire a goodly portion of them, courtesy of her husband at the time, Danil Khachaturov, whose insurance-industry fortune made him the 42nd richest man in Russia.

The two met in 2004 in a dentist’s waiting room. She was a single mother to a three-year-old boy by then – “I felt a total loser” – and was wearing one of her signature long dresses and headscarves in best babushka style. He was there with his bodyguards. His first words to her were, “Are you an actress? Are you OK? What’s wrong with you?”

Khachaturov was inconveniently married to someone else at the time but, one divorce and four years later, they wed. This was the era when other Real Housewives of Moscow were wearing slashed-to-the-everything creations by Versace and Roberto Cavalli. “Everybody was laughing at me.”

With ex-husband Danil Khachaturov, 2011

With ex-husband Danil Khachaturov, 2011PHOTOSHOT

Sergeenko’s marriage ended in 2015. It was her husband, with whom she has a daughter, who stumped up for the launch of her label seven years ago. “I was already doing things with other ateliers,” she says. “I would sketch something, they would do it for me. I used to get mad that they would then use my ideas elsewhere. So that gave me a reason to create my own brand.”

People were snooty, of course. They saw it as nothing more than a vanity project. “And in some ways, I agreed,” she says. “I did not have a design education. But I am learning all the time.”

She originally employed three people in her Moscow atelier; now there are 120. Her clients are 35 per cent Russian, 25 per cent Middle Eastern, then European, with a smattering from elsewhere. For Russians, part of the label’s appeal is its references to, well, Russianness. The latest collection, for example, with its lacework and floral embellishment, is inspired by a china tea set that was found in every household during the Soviet era. “When my clients saw it, they were very happy,” says Sergeenko.

Paris Fashion Week 2015

Paris Fashion Week 2015GETTY IMAGES

The supermodel Natalia Vodianova was one of the first of her countrywomen to embrace the label. “She has always been like a fairy godmother to us.” Russian fashion is, in fact, having something of a moment. Other designers from the former Soviet bloc, most notably Demna Gvasalia and Gosha Rubchinskiy, have made their names by making Communist-era frumpery cool. Sergeenko’s approach is more historicist, and is heavy on the frills and furbelows.

It is also modest. Long sleeves and skirts are her thing, high necklines, an idiosyncratic line in headgear. This is what pulls in the Middle Eastern punters. Sheikha Moza Bint Nasser al-Missned, mother of the emir of Qatar, is a walking billboard for the brand. “She wears only couture,” says Sergeenko. “I think she is the only one.”

With her daughter, Vasilia, 2015

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With her daughter, Vasilia, 2015GETTY IMAGES

Sergeenko the brand is now, after “a really difficult time”, independent. “I am grateful to my ex-husband, because I’m not sure that everything would have happened without him. But it was a small bet for him. And with the divorce he took everything away, and we had to pay everything back.” (One sign that reality has if not bitten, then at least nibbled: the large jewels dangling from Sergeenko’s earlobes are, she clarifies, quartz, rather than diamonds.) “It has been really hard for Frol and me, because we were very dreamy people.” They both laugh. “Yes, it has cost us a lot to be dreamy,” says Burimskiy.

But Sergeenko’s propensity to dream was where it all began. “I always used to have an image in my head of what I wanted to look like, and I didn’t care what other people thought. My mother and grandmother made all my clothes. I would tell them exactly what I wanted.” She shows me a picture of her as a little girl in a beautiful cutwork blouse, stripy knitted skirt and socks.

By the time she hit her teens, she was customising her school uniform (“I would always change the lengths; I would wear trousers under the skirt”), doing “crazy things” with her hair and falling upon what few western influences she could find (“I loved Some Like It Hot, but it was cut. Some of the scenes were not very Soviet”). When the family moved to St Petersburg, she was scouted as a model, but her parents were having none of it. “I was upset at the time, but now I think it was the right decision. I wasn’t beautiful enough to make it as a top model. I am better at designing clothes.”

Ulyana Sergeenko's spring/summer 2018 designs

Ulyana Sergeenko's spring/summer 2018 designs

As the ice thaw of perestroika began, her love of fashion gained a fresh edge. “I dreamt of owning Adidas,” she says. “My parents wouldn’t buy it for me. It was one month’s salary. I remember crying and crying.” Then there was an incident with her first pair of jeans. She confesses that she took her grandmother’s “very beautiful, very Soviet” earrings and exchanged them for a pair of jeans. “It was a scandal,” she says. “My babushka forgave me, but my parents were so mad. And the jeans weren’t even Levi’s. They were fake.”

Sergeenko may still dabble in western streetwear in her off-duty moments, much to Burimskiy’s horror. But it’s those earrings, along with all the other elements of Tolstoy-meets-Pasternak babushka-dom, that are her USP. What she tries to do with her designs, she tells me, “is reproduce my childhood memories. We had a unique experience growing up in the Soviet Union. We were cut off for such a long time. We have our own story.” That this story should now hold such consumerist allure is one of the more intriguing fashion footnotes of our age.

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14:39, 18 февраля 2018

Автор: iLITE

Комменты 161

Аватар

“Khachaturov was inconveniently married to someone else at the time” – какая прелесть))) И вот это еще понравилось “It has been really hard for Frol and me, because we were very dreamy people.”

Аватар

И снится мне -в притонах Сан -Франциско лиловый НЕГР Вам подает манто....Вертинского не петь,запретить.Либо-Лиловый Афроамериканец ВАм подает мааантооо.

Аватар

Не, не прокатит. Без денег на большие показы не хватит, будет делать маленькие по гостиничным номерам, отшивать наряды для восточных принцесс- но это не большой бизнес, так, Ателье-салон. Репутацию она себе подмочила конкретно. Интересно, как быстро или не очень восстановится Мира?

K

Интересно, а на концерне Канье Уеста, белые могут подпевать ему, темнокожие как на это реагируют

K

Интересно, а на концерне Канье Уеста, белые могут подпевать ему, темнокожие как на это реагируют

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