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Moscow parties as global capitalism burns

MOSCOW - Foppish businessmen flirt with models in glitzy dresses, women crowd around jewellery displays, club revellers sip champagne -- Russia's party scene is showing little sign of a financial crisis.

‘Moscow's not the kind of city where you feel a crisis,’ said Katya Kochubei, a designer showing off her decadent 18th century-style gowns inspired by French queen Marie Antoinette at Moscow Fashion Week.

While the rest of the world sinks into ever greater economic gloom and Moscow's stock markets crash, the good times roll on for a Russian elite used to big spending during an unprecedented economic boom over the past few years.

In a report last week, US research consultancy Bain and Company said markets like Russia would provide ‘a buffer of growth’ for luxury goods companies and would continue to grow at 20 percent a year over next five years.

‘Our clients are high class. They're company directors. They're not feeling it,’ said Mikhail Afanasyev, a tailor who makes English suits for oil tycoons in Siberia and the Urals for some 8,000 dollars (6,000 euros) each.

One client recently put in an order for 40 tailor-made suits from Afanasyev.

There was little hardship at the fashion fair bonanza, where girls in backless dresses shimmied to thumping music and raked through the latest designs as chain-smoking youngsters sipped six-dollar (five-euro) espressos.

Some of Russia's super rich have felt the pinch -- relatively speaking.

Metals tycoon Oleg Deripaska, until recently Russia's richest man, has lost billions of dollars from a fortune estimated by Forbes magazine this year at some 28 billion dollars and experts are warning the fall-out could get bigger.The shake-up in the Russian elite will be ‘in every way as big’ as the 1998 financial crash that caused 80 percent of Russian names to disappear from the Forbes rich list, said Vladimir Fedorin, the deputy editor of Forbes Russia.

But the influential Vedomosti business daily said in a recent editorial that even if some billionaires go under, a new generation with connections to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and state corporations will take their place.

The tabloids meanwhile appear to have been more concerned recently with the fate of Maxim Galkin, a television personality who has apparently been forced to halt construction of his imitation French chateau near Moscow by the crisis.

Among those shrugging off the prospect of economic bad times ahead for Russia were exhibitors at the Extravaganza ‘luxury lifestyle’ fair this month in Moscow's Manezh exhibition hall.

‘Even if there is a crisis. I think Russians are going to keep spending to show that they can cope with it,’ said Nathalie Joly, the French owner of a high-end catering service for weddings and parties in Moscow.

Business is so good for Alexander Amosu, a London jeweller making diamond-encrusted gadgetry, that he is looking for a distributor in Moscow.

‘We've got a lot of Russian customers. They fly over to London especially,’ he said, as he showed off a diamond-encrusted gold-framed Bluetooth earpiece -- ‘David Beckham's got one’ -- on sale for 4,000 dollars.

Asked who would buy his jewelry at a time of financial belt-tigthening, Amosu said: ‘When you've got 20 million in the bank, you're not going to worry about spending 20,000 for a special someone.’

Magazines on display advertised expensive cigars, yachts and holiday homes. Outside the exhibition hall, Russian teenagers queued up to have their picture taken next to a Ferrari, a Lamborghini, a Rolls Royce and a Bentley.

Times are good also for Andy Street, a developer from Thailand who said he was in Russia for the first time and had just sold a Russian customer a five-million dollar villa in the resort of Phuket.

‘This is a serious market for us... We hope to expand,’ he said.