From Hyde Park to Portobello Through Kyiv

Fashion designer Viktoriya Gres says she kept her Autumn-Winter 2000-01 Collection in a British vein. It was displayed shortly before the Fashion Season, but those assuming that it came down to stiff gray-black silhouettes are wrong. The style of the country bestowing the world with the Beatles and punks is anything but stiff or monotonous. Nor is there anything coincidental about the title of Viktoriya’s collection, On the Road from Hyde Park to Portobello.

Indeed, the distance between Hyde Park, with respectable ladies and gentlemen strolling up and down the alleys, and Portobello, with its boisterous flea market and the world’s most popular antiquities shops, is rather short, as is the distance between today’s classic style and youth garment design, retro and contemporary styles. And so this collection, just like displays found on London streets, the city being the world’s most cosmopolitan venue, is a combination of all conceivable styles: conservative velvet, tweed, hand-woven cardigan, furs, patchworks, bead embroideries, “Asian” pants for men with the classic back button pocket, and entirely European raincoats, and certainly opera hats, beaded purses, shawls, and neckerchiefs.

And the collection’s color range obviously lacks asceticism, revealing the whole range, from pitch dark to a variety of colorful overtones, stressing cream-beige, gray, corral, and gold. Viktoriya Gres singled out red, again vogue after a brief decline, in her own special way, using it in the interior design of her boutique open again after repair.