This Isn’t Just Shopping, It’s Moscow Shopping

Photos by Peter Hunt

Where is everybody? I’m in Moscow and I’m supposed to be witnessing women in jewels and Dolce & Gabbana fighting like cats over the latest diamond-studded Vertu phones, except there’s no one here.

The phones are here. (Good God! Am I converting right from roubles? Is the phone in my hand really £10,000? What the hell is it made of? Real diamonds? Ah. It is made of real diamonds. Yes, I will put it down then. But there’s no need to be so snarky. What about service with a smile?)

It’s just me and the sales woman in the Vertu store and she wants me to leave, which involves wrapping up and sticking on my stupid fake fur hat. The street outside is empty of pedestrians of course, but the lack of shoppers inside can’t be blamed on the snow. It snows for about half the year here. (They say there are five seasons: spring, summer, autumn, winter and Russian winter). And in any case, when women want to shop - nothing will stop them. (I know this. I’ve interviewed girls from Beirut who ran through sniper fire for a shopping fix). Officially, Russia is the fourth most important luxury market on earth (I learn these figures so you don’t have to) so where the hell are they all?

Next stop is GUM, which is seriously swanky these days. You are too young to recall the olden days when a trip to Moscow meant a bugged room and really nasty food and when Red Square’s GUM was the nation’s largest store and it had nothing in it. (The full name, since you ask, is Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin - or State Department Store - although it used to be so grim, instead of GUM, Westerners called it GLUM).

A million light years ago, long before Mikhail Gorbachev was just another model in a Louis Vuitton advert, long before we had to learn to spell Perestroika and Glasnost, way back in the days when Russia was the enemy and Kevin Costner was a still a movie star and playing Yuri in “No Way Out” - (Rent it. He was hot once. Honestly) - GUM used to feature on the BBC news ringed by an endless line of women with faces like cabbages or little shrunken apples. I now suspect this may have been faked anti-Soviet propaganda because the Russian women I see in the restaurants, the clubs (if not in the shops) are so beautiful, they simply cannot have had those cabbage women as mothers. (Maybe the Americans cast a couple of old ladies, one with a face like a cabbage, the other with a little face like a shrunken apple and did all their close ups in a studio in Wisconsin or something and beamed it out to the world? After all, there are those who believed they faked the moon landings, not just to trick us in the West but to really freak out the Reds who had sent up Yuri Gagarin after a little dog called Laika only for the Yanks to step on the moon first - or so they said - and claim the prize.)

Anyway, very beautiful people shop at GUM today - they say. But where are they? Maybe they are sightseeing, because it would be a sin to miss St. Basil’s, built for Ivan the Terrible, given it is so close. Also, I am certain there will be people in Red Square, hundreds of them, snaking in a long line to see the pickled corpse of Lenin in his tomb. But no, just two guards shifting from side to side trying to keep warm. I want to see Lenin’s waxy feet, especially as we could whiz through, but my Russian friends are not having it. Why? Because they have seen the dead man who has been lying in state since 1924 too often already? “I’ve never been in there and I never would,” says the uber-glamourous Olga. So, getting our priorities right, we head to Dior instead.

There has to be someone in the Dior store. Russia is one of the key global markets for Dior and Russian women don’t just buy the handbags like everyone else, they actually buy the ready-to-wear, which must surely be enough to make John Galliano want to learn to write them thank you letters in cyrillic script. In fact, the Russians have loved Dior since long before Galliano took over, because they were Dior fans from the beginning. As for Christian Dior himself, he fell in love with Russia before the New Look was even a twinkle in his eye. The designer himself visited Red Square, before W.W.II and thus both before he was a world famous designer and while Russia could still be visited - which became altogether more tricky in the Soviet times. Still, that didn’t stop a Dior fashion show taking place in Moscow in 1959, two years after the designer himself had dropped dead. The Dior store, which is duck egg blue against the snow, opened in 1998, which was brave because that was when the Russian economy was looking distinctly shaky. Today it looks very fetching - and very empty.

Ha! I spot people. Or person. And she’s shopping. By now, we’re in the Vacheron Constantin store looking at some seriously expensive Swiss watches. Of course you’d expect the watches from a Swiss watchmaker to be expensive, but here - although Vacheron Constantin is far from a bling-y brand (all very elegant, actually) there are more diamonds than you’d find in Bond Street. Will she buy? It seems she might but not while a woman in a funny hat is watching her. So as not to blow a £40,000 sale, I leave.

Onwards, past Ralph Lauren which is all lit up and shining against the snow, past the Bentley showroom (no price tags, so I have no idea how much Olga’s fabulous car must be worth) onwards until we reach Versace, where the bodyguard is enormous, as is the bed offered in the Versace furniture range. The Versace shop is very shiny and rather big, but rumour has it, it would have been bigger if they had been allowed to dig out the basement. You see, there’s a problem with basements round here. There are tales of retailers trying to renovate and suddenly, armed guards pop up through the floor. Because underneath this bit of Moscow, right by the Kremlin - which is the seat of political power despite all the fairy tale spires - and near the Lubyanka, which is no longer the most notorious prison in the East but is still very imposing - are, apparently, a whole network of secret underground tunnels which you wouldn’t want to disturb just for some extra stockroom space. Down below in secret Moscow are, they say, roads so wide you can drive a tank through them - although apparently the late president, Leonid Brezhnev (he was the one in the big fur hat on the BBC news, although of course Khrushchev and Yeltsin wore big fur hats too) loved a bit of underground driving in his Mercedes at about 200 miles an hour while his so-called driver hung on for dear life in the back. Nowadays, Putin does not drive underground. His massive convoy leaves the Rublevka area - where all the rich people live outside of Moscow - and drives at full speed to the Kremlin as roads close to let the convoy through. Apparently, they stop for nothing and drive-to-kill. (“It’s such a drag,” one superrich women will tell me over dinner. “You leave the house early for a spot of shopping and suddenly Putin wants to go to the office and they close all the roads and you are sitting there until lunchtime.” So THAT’s where all the shoppers are - stuck in traffic!).

No wonder then many prefer to head to the shopping centres outside of the city. Our next stop is Crocus Mall where a key attraction is the outside heated fountain. Inside we spot people! Except they all seem very gussied up, even for Russia. It turns out there are several weddings going on. Brides and grooms are posing; draped over cars for sale in the downstairs atrium, over the summery rattan furniture (it’s tropical in here and the succulent plants are real) and even posing next to the information board, which tells you where to find Agent Provocateur and where to find Zara. The centre of the mall is full of seats, waiting for a wedding party to arrive. As for the wedding banquet, that’s all laid out on the mezzanine floor.

Crocus Mall is indoor, which makes sense, while Barvikha Luxury Village at Rublevka - where the mega-rich live - is outside, which makes no sense to me at all, because I have to put on that damn hat just to slip-slide over the snow between Gucci and Tiffany. But judging by the Bentleys and the Mercs and the BMWs and the scary looking drivers, there are people here, and yes! they are shopping. Ok, it would be a lie to say there are hoards of shoppers or that they are fighting over anything, but there are people inside the Dolce & Gabbana store and the Giorgio Armani store and they are flicking through the racks at Roberto Cavalli where I spot 12 coats at more than £15,000 each, as well as a skintight stretchy gold sequined gown (“handmade!” trills the shop assistant) where the price converts to £53,202.56.

That cannot be right. I borrow a calculator and sit down on the snakeskin-effect pouf (as in ottoman, not as in chap) to do the conversion again. Yup, that shimmer of sequins really is £53,202.56. I ask the sales assistant how many have been sold. None, she admits, but she saw me fingering the sable and goat fur coat with the gold trim. They’ve sold several of those, she brightens and the snakeskin jackets have been flying out of the store.

With who they have been flying out of the store with remains a mystery, because the Russian shoppers I spot leave without buying. As for the fabled Russian big spender in her sable, I’ve sought her here, I’ve sought her there and all I’ve got for my trouble is bad hat hair. But what is a hard numbers, bottom-line fact according to the likes of LVMH and Richemont and Gucci Group - aka the people who control luxury fashion worldwide - is that she is here somewhere and she likes to pay cash and loves to pay full price. What’s not to love? They say.

So when do they shop? “At night” say the sales associate I quiz in the morning. “In the morning” say those I ask at night. So what time in the morning? “1 am, 2 am. We will stay open if a customer is here and she is spending,” says someone at Barvikha Luxury Village. That’s when I decide that I’m just going to choose to believe the Russian shopper comes out in the frozen Russian dawn without needing to see her with my very own eyes, because I’m sure as hell not going to do a stake out in these temperatures. “We shop when we feel like it,” says uber-glam Olga. “We might go to a night club and then decide it’s time to buy. Do you want to join us?” Number 1 rule of journalism, stick with the subject and follow the story. Or not. It’s freezing and the cold is now coming through my (fake) furry boots and there’s that massive big warm bed waiting at the Ritz-Carlton. When I decline it is 1am, but Olga casts me a glance as if I’ve just told her I like to go to bed at 8 pm with a big mug of Horlicks. “You’ll love it!” she says as she then hits the gas and we roar off into the winter night.