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Why I’m done with Gosha Rubchinskiy

A fashion revolutionary who's behind the times

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Earlier this year luxe streetwear upstart Gosha Rubchinskiy put out a casting call via Instagram looking for male models for his SS17 show. The Instagram posts outlining the details asked for various things: height, shoe size, and so on — before providing an email to send headshots to. This month we saw the result of that casting call: one person of colour walked in Rubchinskiy’s SS17 runway. A sole non-white face amongst 30 looks.

The callout didn’t specify any particular ‘look’ that the label was searching for, but anyone who’s been following the designer’s work knows. In his past five runways, Rubchinskiy has used two non-white models. Across his label’s lookbooks, he has used one non-white model. The fashion press has taken to calling the designer’s aesthetic ‘Post-Soviet’, but the quiet exclusion of people of colour is decidedly older fashioned than any buzzword. This kind of exclusion is commonplace in the industry, but the clout Gosha has in streetwear circles means that his label carries a good deal more influence than most.

It’s no big secret that fashion is overwhelmingly white; so why is it such a big deal that Gosha Rubchinskiy only uses white models? Perhaps it’s because Gosha’s clothing is so often labelled as ‘revolutionary’. Maybe it’s because Gosha himself has said that his brand is “above the system”. It could be because the fashion press can’t seem to stop using terms like “visionary” to describe Rubchinskiy. While the designs themselves (simple, quiet pieces, exciting and punk-like in the way that they invert the excessive branding of luxury labels) might be considered radical, there’s nothing revolutionary about the casting of Gosha’s shows, nothing visionary. For a while it seemed like whites-only casting was the domain of the old guard — luxury labels stuck in the elitist past of fashion. So when a fresh label like Gosha Rubchinskiy, a label anointed the ‘future’ of fashion, reveals itself to be just as homogenous, it feels like a betrayal.

Much of the coverage of Rubchinskiy’s clothing has centred on the way that he uses less traditional techniques to pick his models, such as street-casting and Instagram. In addition to this many of the models used are the designer’s own friends, Eastern-European club kids with cheekbones as sharp as their buzzcuts. Casting only white models and defending the decision by saying you only cast your friends feels weak and lazy. These unusual and supposedly more ‘authentic’ methods of casting tie into the ‘revolutionary’ tag often put upon the designer. His consistent use of these methods has also spun a media narrative that suggests Rubchinskiy is depicting an (assumed) authentic portrait of ‘post-Soviet youth’.

The argument that Gosha’s models represent an accurate reflection of ‘post-Soviet youth’ feels disingenuous too. The Russian youth that Rubchinskiy’s models are supposedly emulating can’t afford clothes with designer price tags. Remove the idea that Gosha presents an image of Eastern European teen culture to the world and you’re left with little more than a man commodifying and glamorizing western fantasies of Eastern Europe. Even if Russia’s population was mostly white, when your collections are being shown and worn globally, don’t you have a responsibility to cast a diverse range of models? So many trends in fashion, streetwear in particular, are drawn from people of colour. To then see those people of colour erased from the most hyped runway shows feels ugly, nefarious.

People of colour have seen themselves underrepresented in fashion for too long, and it feels like now is the time for that to change. Even if he is wildly popular, Gosha Rubchinskiy is not an exception to this. It was only a few months ago that Vetements and Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia was widely criticised for his use of only white models in both labels’ A/W New York Fashion Week shows. More voices will begin to join the conversation surrounding Rubchinskiy’s overwhelming whiteness, and hopefully he and his label will be brought to reckoning, much in the same way that Gvasalia was.

The designer of the moment, whoever they are, often feels critically unimpeachable, but with fashion in a state of flux in regards to representation, this feels like the moment to call out the most influential designers and to ask them to simply do better. If you wear Gosha, this isn’t meant to come across as critical or condemnatory; it’s possible to love something that’s problematic. But loving something means wanting it to be better, to be the best it can be. If the label in its current incarnation really is the ‘future’ of fashion I’m not sure that I want to be a part of it. I want Gosha Rubchinskiy to be better, you should too.

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