Slavs of Fashion

in: Models

An editorial, photographed by Patrick Demarchelier on Harbour Island in the Bahamas, with a lenghty double title "From Russia with Sand, Surf, and Microbikinis!" and "Slavs of Fashion: The New Beauties" was published in April/2005 issue of Vanity Fair. Featured models are: Natalia Vodianova, Carmen Kass, Karolina Kurkova, Eugenia Volodina, Hana Soukupova, Marija Vujovic, Natasha Poly, Valentina Zelyaeva, Inguna Butane. Gawker bashed this ed on the grounds that Eastern European models aren't representing any new trend and that the whole thing rather belongs to Maxim than to Vanity Fair. IMHO this is much better than pretty much anything published in Maxim, but I do have a bone to pick with Evgenia Peretz, who wrote the text for this ed. Out of the total of 9 models only 4 (Vodianova, Volodina, Poly & Zelyaeva) are from Russia and only 6 (+ Kass & Butane) from the former Soviet Union, so there is a little problem with "From Russia..." title. The other version of the title - "Slavs of Fashion" - concentrates on the ethnicity, rather than the country of origin, and does a better job, but still isn't quite correct - Kass is Estonian, Butane is Latvian, and neither Estonian, nor Latvian belongs to Slavic subfamily of Indo-European family (Latvian -> Baltic -> Indo-European; Estonian -> Finno-Ugric -> Uralic). And I'm not even going to start about as stupid as it gets "Got Vodka?" slogan...

Anyway, here are the pics:














Vanity Fair website also a has a video, with yet another version of the title "Behind the Iron Catwalk: The New Supermodels", apparently shooting for a witty parallel with Churchill's Fulton speech.

And finally a note about the spelling of Russian lastnames. Luckily for Водянова and Володина, their last names adopted single versions of transliteration, which they are now known by - Vodianova and Volodina respectively. Poor Зеляева is being probably equvally often credited as either Zelyaeva or Zeliaeva and every once in a while as Zelaeva. This probably explains why Полевщикова decided to reduce cumberosme latinisation of her lastname - Polevshchikova - to simple Poly.