Alexander Vasiliyev: "We began to dress like beggars. Shabbily, tastelessly and shoddily"

The famous fashion historian and TV presenter on the YouTube channel Empathy of Manuchi shared his thoughts on the luggage with which Russia entered the 21st century.

“If a full-fledged Fashion Museum appears, we will see that the proletarian revolution was bullshit. People began to live worse than they did before the revolution.

If you just hang a 1916 dress and a 1918 dress, a 1900 and 1937 dress. Dresses from one country. I'm not saying that you need to bring Parisian or New York ones.

And we will see that we began to dress like beggars. Shabbily, tastelessly and shoddily.

This is the truth of life.

The revolution completely knocked our country out of the context of world fashion.

And if we first put on beautiful Russian pre-revolutionary outfits, and then put on Parisian ones, so no one will see the difference. But this will be a "stupid lie".

Therefore, we do not have a single book about architecture before the revolution and after the revolution, about Russian furniture before and after the revolution, about applied art before the revolution and after the revolution.

Everything begins with us - any Russian edition, any museum - until 1917 or from 1917 onwards.

To avoid this comparison. This comparison is not in favor of the Bolsheviks.

I'm telling the truth, people don't like it. Then all sorts of grabbers come and write: "Vasiliev, what did he say there, how ashamed he is!"

And the revolution for Russia, of course, was a catastrophe: economic, political and human. We only had losses in the human fund.

This is not only Stalin's purges, this is a war, these are departures to Israel and America, these are other creative emigration, all sorts of defectors. This is a huge amount that left with the Germans.

This is taboo. We cannot say... Vlasov is a traitor! Yes! Vlasov is a traitor, I agree with you!

But why did not a single general go over to the Germans in the First World War? And why fifteen more generals of the Soviet army left with Vlasov? Why didn't anyone go over to the Kaiser?

Or during the Russo-Japanese War, why did no one go over to the Emperor of Japan? And why did 10 million former Soviet soldiers join the Vlasov army? (In the book "Foreign formations of the Third Reich", authors S. Drobyazko, O. Romanko, K. Semenov, on page 533 it is said: "The total number of Russians, actually or formally subordinate to Vlasov, was, according to various estimates, at the end of the war - that is, in April 1945, from 100 to 124 thousand people, and the main combat formations were the so-called First and Second Infantry Divisions, which the Germans managed to form and staff completely", - noted by Novye Izvestia)

Wait. And why did the Germans, on the contrary, not come over to us?

Well, tell this truth.

Yes, he is a pure traitor! But how did it happen that there was such a situation? That it could be betrayed. What was it for? For money? No, against Stalin.

This is a political issue and I know that many will be interested in this and then there will be an endless discussion on the Internet ...

Our country got rid of all this in the new century, thanks to the Internet. On the one hand, the Internet enlightened everyone, and on the other, it completely killed our culture.

Because today a Tik Tok star is someone who has sneakers and who jumps high and who has seven, ten, twenty million followers.

Like Olga Buzova, like other stars, whose names I forget. I really like one show, where his host throws toilet paper at the screen, and now, wrapped in this paper, she received some 12 million subscribers.

Our pop stars who climb into Tik Tok - they don't want to grow old, they don't want to lag behind, they want to be in trend, but they don't take it seriously.

I know that Tik Tok was not invented for this. And in order for a person to never let go of the phone, to be in touch and watch all the ads.

Tik Tok is a place, a platform for selling advertisements that you push between jumps in your sneakers. The main subscribers are children. Therefore, it is not surprising that now children at the age of three say to their parents: "I want just such a machine."

Before the pandemic, we lived in the realities of the 20th century. For the first twenty years it was the tail of a 20th century comet.

And only now we have entered a new century, XXI. He is real, he is different, he is tough.

And, as in their time, all the stars of the XIX century sailed into oblivion, after 1917, together with the end of the Silver Age, and now, together with the end - as I call it - of the plasterboard age, which was until 2020, all singers and artists and films and writers and our realities.

But nevertheless, we must remember that by 2020 we have come with poor cultural results.

And I will tell you which ones: we are a giant country, of high culture and history, but we do not have a single national philosopher, we do not have a single national poet.

We have a lot of poets, but so that he is responsible for the country...

We do not have a single national writer, historian, sculptor, architect or even composer. All the composers we have have inherited from the 20th century. Shchedrin, Zhurbin and we will draw more ... Agree with me?

So what did we come with? With what cultural results?

We came with Tik Tok, bravo!"

You can watch the entire interview with Alexander Vasiliyev here.