Editions de Parfums in Moscow, Luxury in Russia {Fragrance & Luxury News}
FashionMag.fr (subscription only) has announced that Editions de Parfums have opened a boutique-within-a-store on November 29th 2007 at the venerable Tsum in Moscow. Many other Western beauty and luxury brands are establishing themselves in Russia and at the Tsum in particular. A quick look at the picture indicates that the Tsum department store has undergone a total makeover since the Soviet period when a certain air of grandeur was mixed then with more prosaic offerings. Next stops for maximum expansion for Frederic Malle are Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
The high-end niche perfumery Malle founded, which proposes new standards of refinement, such as greater creative freedom for its stable of perfumers, authorial signatures on flacons, a refrigerator for optimal preservation of the perfumes, and scent columns to isolate oneself to smell the perfumes, will fit right in the new Russia which is developing an impressive taste for luxury, apparently as big as mother Russia itself.......
You can read an article in the New York Times reporting on the phenomenon,
"Inside the majestic 19th-century Manege exhibition hall, a cologned and perfumed crowd in its best prêt-à-porter is eagerly browsing the thousands of masterworks on display for the fourth annual Moscow World Fine Art Fair. Valued at over $1 billion, the collection of old master canvases, Impressionist oils and abundant antiques wouldn't look out of place in the Louvre. But as the quietly fingered credit cards and checkbooks remind, the fair is the city's most sophisticated home décor sale. It's also a top gala on Moscow's expanding social calendar, a kind of cultural counterpoint to the annual Millionaire Fair, which caters more toward demand for diamond-encrusted cellphones, gold coffee pots and private islands."
You can also read another article in The Nation spanking the NYT for its series of reports exclusively devoted to the money elite in Russia,
"In the last few weeks, the New York Times has devoted at least four articles to extolling the opulence of the oil-boom-fueled "new" Russia --especially the orgy of conspicious consumption in today's Moscow. It's as if the NYT decided to morph into US Weekly covering the lifestyles of Russia's rich and greedy. Each article exudes a kind of breathless excitement. "Moscow is renewing itself with a vigor and opulence seen in few other places on the planet."
Is the New York Times obsessed with Moscow's oligarch-ettes?.....
