Russians and Adidas: Who Makes Whom?

Two internet-famous names have teamed up, carrying a hidden football subculture and the clothes of Russian street toughs into polite company.

"Adidas is on the runway again."

For most people, that sentence probably conjures up something like Coca-Cola walking a fashion-week show. Anyone a little closer to the news might instead picture the futuristic sportswear Kanye West made for the Trefoil.

But the show Adidas staged with designer Gosha Rubchinskiy on January 13 was odd from the venue onward: a former stock exchange built in 1875 in Kaliningrad, Russia. Plenty of the guests caught the strangeness of the moment. Several things were in the air at once — Rubchinskiy's own designs, loaded with meaning; how loudly Adidas had been talked about in fashion over the past year; and, with politics already tense, the allegations disclosed days earlier that Russia had interfered in the U.S. presidential election. All of it left fashion critics and reporters oddly excited to read the show for reasons that had little to do with clothes.

Two internet-famous figures have come together. On the surface, this is just Adidas signing up one more name after a run of icons. But if you don't yet know Gosha Rubchinskiy and the "post-Soviet" look he leads, you're running out of time to catch up. Pushed to the front of the fashion world by Adrian Joffe — the husband of Rei Kawakubo and the president of Comme des Garçons — Rubchinskiy is at the peak of his career.

In 2008, Gosha Rubchinskiy said that in ten years "everyone would be talking about" him. He needed only eight. Over the past two years his name has been spoken in the same breath as the Gvasalia brothers, founders of the hot label Vetements — Gosha was born in Moscow, the Gvasalias in Georgia — and Western fashion media use the word "post-Soviet" for the work of both. The Guardian wrote: "If Moscow, with its punk and rollerblading subcultures, is going to be the next fashion destination, then Gosha Rubchinskiy is its poster boy." Vogue said they have "all the qualities of an unforgettable fashion classic."

Gosha Rubchinskiy's eponymous label keeps digging into nostalgia for the post-Soviet 1990s, bringing the style of young men hanging around the edges of Moscow to Western eyes. In December 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Russia, Georgia, Ukraine and the other post-Soviet states fell into political, economic and cultural disorder. Gosha grew up in those years and watched Western pop culture and consumerism arrive: McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Vogue, MTV... At the same time those economies were unstable and the ruble lost half its value, so young people had to work out their fashion needs from their parents' wardrobes and secondhand shops.

The sleeves that hang down to the legs, the asymmetry, the deconstructed jeans, the T-shirts and sweatshirts that make jokes out of consumerism's best-known logos — everything you saw last year is the daily life of young Russians on the street, packaged. "Post-Soviet style" hands Western trendsetters a product that romanticizes the bottom of society and the so-called "other." The clearest case is the T-shirt printed with the courier company DHL's logo that Gosha Rubchinskiy wore to open the Vetements Spring/Summer 2016 show: an exquisite piece of sarcasm.

Unlike Vetements, which will cheerfully ask $1,400 for a pair of jeans, Gosha Rubchinskiy prices his clothes relatively "democratically," and pushes the Russian flavor harder. His first solo collection, "Evil Empire," was thick with politics and a Western point of view: a phrase President Reagan used for the Cold War Soviet Union, turned into hoodies printed with the hammer and sickle and sportswear full of brown bears and nods to Kalashnikov, the father of the AK-47. It came out during the Georgian conflict of the time, and Gosha did call the show "a performance." "I just wanted to scare them a little," he said.

That kind of cool clearly chimes with the taste of America's angry elite. What better way to express yourself than to wear what they take to be the script closest to Donald Trump's heart after English?

But as Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, editor of Vestoj and a critic of "post-Soviet style," put it: Vetements is not the revolution — branded Vetements is the revolution. Every era has its supposedly coolest outsiders challenging a sleepy old order, and in an industry that turns on a dime, that is not news. What actually surrounds Gosha Rubchinskiy is a rather shrewd business. First, he caught athleisure, the hottest trend of recent years: wearing sneakers and sportswear with tailoring on the street has become the emblem of streetwear's takeover of the fashion houses. And as with "Hiroshima chic" years ago, the house that found Gosha and carried him to Europe and America was Comme des Garçons, which knows this market well and has long practice in selling trends from "small places."

In this arrangement Gosha Rubchinskiy only designs; Comme des Garçons produces and distributes. His clothes sold out fast at Rei Kawakubo's Dover Street Market stores around the world. Now Adidas has taken a liking to that same knack for working a trend. If you know how NMD drops a new limited colorway every two weeks, you can see why the two sides agreed so quickly.

Only this time the runway belonged not to the Trefoil but to Adidas's football line. Releasing adidas Soccer x Gosha Rubchinskiy now fits the occasion of the 21st World Cup, which Russia hosts in 2018.

Going by what has been disclosed, this is not a brief collaboration: the two sides will work together for three seasons. Besides two more shows in Russian World Cup host cities, there may also be a book, or a "World Cup capsule collection."

"There's no license, no formal agreement, no royalty fee. Gosha designs, Adidas manufactures, I distribute. I make my money on the usual cost markup, and then I pay Gosha. There's no financial relationship between Adidas and Gosha. It's just a simple contract," Adrian Joffe, president of Comme des Garçons, told BoF. The collaboration pieces, he said, will cost 20% to 30% more than ordinary football-line products, and will be sold in only 120 stores worldwide, Dover Street Market among them.

"We won't be selling it in football shops."

For the German sports giant, whose market performance was poor for the previous two years, turning running shoes into a fashion trend gave it a taste of growth. Now it is football's turn. All of this looks a lot like Adidas's work with Kanye West, and this time it has handed over even more control — no one will be saying Adidas has been "reduced to Gosha's contract manufacturer."

Seen from the wider market, the collaboration also fits Adidas's intention of winning Russia back. In 2015 Adidas closed 290 stores worldwide, 200 of them inside Russia. Russia is Adidas's biggest national market after the United States and China, but as the Russian economy sank and retailers discounted everywhere, Adidas's Russian sales fell 35% in 2015. Herbert Hainer, the former Adidas CEO who left early last September, once said of the Russian market: "Our past success turned us into a victim."

The delicate part is this: in Russia, both football and Adidas mean more than commerce.

Russia's committed football fans are often tied to the right-wing militants known as skinheads, and are known worldwide through the figure of the "fierce Russian football hooligan." It was they who thrashed England's hooligans at last summer's European Championship, leaving the tournament under a shadow of violence.

After the Soviet collapse, Putin played the "football card" to project the influence of a great power, and the sport became a tool through which Russians expressed national feeling and let off steam. As money poured in, clubs such as CSKA Moscow, Spartak Moscow and Zenit Saint Petersburg joined the fight for European titles. Fighting for your home club, and proving loyalty through violence, turned this game into a miniature of Russian nationalism and geopolitics. Some older Russians put the blame on Yeltsin: "After the Soviet collapse, Yeltsin called on young people to embrace freedom, but these kids still can't understand very well what freedom is."

The way this group dresses — tracksuits with tennis shoes, worn to slip past police surveillance — is called terrace culture. You can find plenty of it in the adidas Soccer x Gosha Rubchinskiy collection. The most blatant sign, of course, is that nearly every piece — coats, sweatshirts, joggers, hoodies, sneakers, hats, bags, scarves — has the word "football" written on it in Slavic script, crudely and plainly. More symbolic still may be the location of the show: Kaliningrad, where the new stadium built for the 2018 World Cup was finished on schedule.

For many Eastern European immigrants, football is one of the few ways up in Western society. Against that: the owners of several Premier League clubs are Russian oligarchs who made their first fortunes out of the Soviet collapse. This kind of local cultural grounding is exactly what an international brand like Adidas needs. "A key part of our strategic and creative shift is treating football not just as a sport, but as a really important part of youth culture," Sam Handy, the company's VP of design and creative director for football, explained recently to BoF. "It's easy for an international brand to talk about culture in broad, international terms, but culture is made by local communities."

Oddly enough, Russia is also one of Adidas's biggest markets for fakes. Russians love the three stripes, and they don't much mind whether the stripes are real.

According to an article in Vice, Russia's "Adidas mania" goes back to 1980 and the Moscow Olympics, when kitting out the national team became a problem for a Soviet Union whose light industry lagged far behind. With the logo torn off, the West German brand finally made it onto the athletes' backs. Even so, the three-stripe motif survived, and became a totem of capitalism entering Soviet society.

The more a thing is banned, the wilder it grows. Soviet backwardness and isolation made Adidas's name. Later on, Russian gangsters put Adidas on too. Western sportswear became a badge of authority and force inside the criminal world, and more people followed the fashion by buying fakes. Russian calls these toughs "gopnik," roughly the English "chav" — the latter tied to the flood of Burberry check.

That bone-deep tolerance of fakes, born of having no choice, carries into Gosha's design bloodline as well. One of his bestsellers is a sweatshirt that "combines" the Russian and Chinese flags with the logo of the American casualwear brand Tommy Hilfiger. The young people who wear these clothes are usually so young that they barely understand what the symbols originally meant, but that doesn't bother Gosha: "Using these symbols doesn't mean we believe in them. We're just quoting what's happening in the world."

In today's Western internet culture, "Russians love wearing Adidas" and the "Slav squat" have become a new stereotype to pass the time with, and quite a few people believe Russia still hasn't produced a middle class. Plenty of those spreading the pictures and videos are Eastern Europeans who feel shut out by them, especially when they see someone swanning down the street in a jacket printed with their own country's flag. The awkwardness is roughly what the Russian writer Sasha Raspopina described in an article: "Wouldn't it be a little nationalistic if I wore that jacket myself?"

With all that history behind it, the Adidas and Gosha Rubchinskiy collaboration now seems to offer each side a great deal. Football fans, fashion people, Americans, Russians — all of them seem able to find some reflection of themselves in these nostalgia-soaked clothes. The strange thing is that piling up so much nostalgia has achieved exactly what Adidas wanted: making football feel young and cool. After losing the noise contest to Nike at both the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 European Championship, this unorthodox move has earned the company real credit.

As for Gosha Rubchinskiy, after several seasons of shows in Europe and no shortage of fame and money, he has gone home. He has said plenty of things that sound profound: "Today, people don't believe in globalization, people are afraid of other people, afraid of losing their own identity"; "I've shown a more modern image of the Russian football fan"... Clearly, that makes him look pretty cool too.

The two sides fit each other at so many points that it looks slightly unreal. A line from Lotta Volkova, the internet-famous stylist behind Vetements, works here as well. She said: "Vetements's success lies in reinterpreting the meeting point of several subcultures."

Open a map and look at where Kaliningrad, the site of the show, actually sits, and you may grasp how "dreamlike" this collaboration between Adidas and the Russians is: it is an exclave cut off from the rest of Russian territory, in the middle of Europe, between Poland and Lithuania.

Kaliningrad was once Königsberg, one of Germany's cultural centers. During the Second World War, the Soviet Red Army defeated the Third Reich and occupied this city of seven centuries. The name Kaliningrad dates from 1946, chosen to commemorate Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.

Now the Germans are back.

Cover image via Highsnobiety