Conde Nast’s Traveller 1990.

Kashinkova, and her father was a friend of Felix Dzer­zhinsky [head of Lenin’s Cheka, the Committee for Combating Counterrevolu­tion and Sabotage]. She or­ganized the first salon in the old army dining hall on Petrovka. Models sat right in the window, typing!”

aisa Gorbachev often names Slava Zaitsev as her design­er. Moscow gossip has it that she prefers the “good and exacting taste” of Ta­mara Makayeva’s designs at Dom Modeli. Zaitsev, it seems, is playing Oleg Cas­sini to the Jackie Kennedy of Russia.

“Can the situation be considered normal,” Mi­khail Gorbachev asked the Central Committee in June, “when the making of foot­wear and clothes becomes a great problem?” One sec­tion of the economy that’s never shortchanged by old- style Soviet central plan­ning is the military. So  cheap-chic Muppies clever­ly deploy military tailoring, traditionally exquisite.

Voyentorg, the old Cen­tral Military Department Store, is a haunt of journal­ist Svetlana Kunitsina, a twenty-eight-year-old grad­uate of Moscow State Uni­versity. Scarcity gives a cre­ative nudge to her ward­robe: Piled in her closet in central Moscow are army- navy basics of fine cotton and a pinstriped jacket with the gold buttons of the So­viet Navy. On hangers: two elegant turnouts of the highest quality she can af­ford—a red suit and a black jersey from Dom Modeli’s “Perspective Collection.” The black dress is the same model Mrs. Gorbachev wore to India. This after­noon, sunny Hawaiian- print shirts flutter on Svet­lana’s clothesline. She’s wearing her Moscow Mini, a tight boy’s T-shirt that shows off long legs, a Black Sea resort tan, and her five- eleven cossack’s body.

Svetlana’s work has tak­en her twice to Estonia, and she dresses with the easy so­phistication seen in the Bal­tic republics, where West­ern European TV images are picked up from across the border. In the Baltic re­publics the “look” of West­ern society floods the streets, and the State watches over small experi­ments like privately run hairdressers and boutiques.