Stilyagi: Fashion on the Eastern Front
When I first arrived in Moscow in 2010 to study Russian, I was struck with curiosity about the backwards world in which I had landed. Comparable to neither Europe nor Asia, the barely 20-year-old Russian Federation had embraced the difficult transition to capitalism with great enthusiasm and an eagerness rarely seen in countries recovering from economic depression. For me, the most striking aspect of this radical transformation was not the endless sea of advertisements, nor the comforting sight of Starbucks on a street corner — it was the evolution of fashion sense.