“After the show at the Kremlin in February 1995, I was teasingly referred to as the “Lady in Red”, but “my Russia” dates farther back in time. Mrs. Gromiko attended her first fashion show of a Western designer in my castle in Guidonia in 1982. This event received great coverage in the media, and the New York Times wrote on its first page, “East and West Meet on the Catwalk”. The hours in Moscow are marked by the resounding chimes of the large bell in the Spasskaya Tower, the most beautiful and imposing of the twenty towers surrounding the Kremlin walls. Laura Biagiotti’s fashion hour in Moscow was marked by the light steps of 40 young, lissome Russian models on February 5, 1995, during a presentation of all my collections on the stage of the great theater of the Kremlin. I had recently inaugurated my boutique in Moscow, and during my visit to the Kremlin, I was struck by the great theater that I had seen on TV as a child as the somber backdrop of the USSR Communist Party conventions in the era before Gorbaciov. That past had been buried like a cumbersome dinosaur. Fashion broke through the barrier of the unsatisfied desires of Russian women and made their dreams come true. Fashion is still considered an extraordinary means of communication. My fashion show penetrated the hearts of Russian women and revealed their great desire to look good and to change their image and wardrobe. I like to bring messages where profound social and cultural changes are underway, and in Russia, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I witnessed a revolution in society that was even more profound and radical than in China”.
Laura Biagiotti