On 29 August, at 19:00, Perekroyka, a large-scale project about fashion and social change, opens in the exhibition hall of the Moscow International Museum of Art. The exposition includes samples of avant-garde fashion in Odesa in 1988-1998, photographs and videos of that time.

There is the fashion of names and the fashion of times. It is believed that the fashion of names describes pivotal, global milestones in the development of culture. In contrast, the fashion of the times tells local, very local and subcultural stories, describing the tastes, feelings and desires of specific people living in a certain time and space. And such stories are of increasing interest to us.

The project was co-curated by Zoya Zvynyatskivska, a fashion critic and historian, curator of the exhibition “In Progress. Dress Code of Ukraine in the Era of Independence” (Mystetskyi Arsenal, 2017) and author of the book In Progress. Fashion of Ukraine since 1991. The study is to be published in autumn, and it includes pages dedicated to the Odesa fashion avant-garde.

“In historical moments, when the old way of life is dying and a new one is rapidly emerging, avant-garde fashion emerges. Its function is to expand the boundaries of what is acceptable, to revise and dismantle established traditions, and to demonstrate new horizons. It’s hard to imagine a better city for the avant-garde than Odesa – a city with its own vibrant style, special energy and daring character, a city where clothes have traditionally been the most important form of self-presentation,” explains Zoya Zvynyatskivska about the background of the Perekroyka project.

You will be able to see with your own eyes how fashion responded to socio-political cataclysms from 29 August to 13 October at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Odesa. The art project “Redrawing” is curated by Tatiana-Margarita Xu and Zoya Zvinyatskivska.

The exposition is based on the collections of designers Irina Dratva and Vladimir Umanenko, the work of fashion designer Vanya Ren, as well as photographs by Yuri Boyko, Andrey Moskvichev and Alexander Shevchuk.