Over the weekend, a 16-year-old boy alleged that Russian streetwear designer Gosha Rubchinskiy pressured him into sending explicit photos of himself. The boy, Jan Silfverling, posted conversations he had with Rubchinskiy over Instagram and the WhatsApp messenger app that appear to show the designer prodding for nude photos. Shortly after the initial accusation, another unidentified male surfaced with allegations that Rubchinskiy requested lewd photos. Rubchinskiy categorically denied the accusations in statements and said that a conversation about casting Silfverling in a runway show was manipulated to make the designer’s requests look malicious.
In the screenshots Silfverling posted, Rubchinskiy makes repeated urgent requests for photos. “Send me now something from the bathroom,” one message reads. Silfverling writes back that he can’t because the bathroom is in his mom’s room, and Rubchinskiy aggressively pushes back. “You can go to the bathroom and do it quickly please,” the message reads. “I don’t believe your mum come to bathroom together with you.”
A representative for Rubchinskiy defended the designer by saying that he frequently asks minors for pictures of themselves, sometimes shirtless in their underwear. “Gosha has been doing casting by Instagram for many years now,” the representative told GQ in an e-mail. “It is a normal practice nowadays. We always ask to [sic] face photos, in full length and topless. Sometimes photos in underwear are required in order to understand the volume of hips.” When I asked if this instance would affect how Rubchinskiy casts models moving forward, the representative said, “We are certainly going to be reviewing how we cast shows in the future to minimise the danger of this sort of thing happening.”
Rubchinskiy has harnessed his connection to Russian youth and street culture to create a powerful brand in today’s streetwear-crazy market. In 2012, he partnered with Comme des Garçons, which took over sales, marketing, and production of the designer’s self-titled brand. In a statement, Comme des Garçons’ president, Adrian Joffe, said he was “deeply concerned” by the allegations but added, “I abhor the mob mentality of social media and the guilty until proved [sic] innocent syndrome which seems to be the order of the day. While I deeply deplore the abuse of power in any industry, I am waiting for the whole truth to come out.”
Since partnering with CdG, Rubchinskiy has collaborated with high-profile brands like Burberry, Reebok, and Adidas. (All three did not immediately respond to requests for comment.) He was selected as a guest designer by Pitti Uomo in 2016 and has put on multiple fashion shows in Russia involving exactly the sort of under-18 models tied up in this controversy.
Working directly with, and taking inspiration from, youth and youth culture has been the bedrock of the Gosha Rubchinskiy brand since its launch. Thus, Rubchinskiy’s team argued the designer needs to be in direct contact with teenagers. “If you want to be heard by the teenagers, then more time with them you should spend. To listen and to understand them,” the representative wrote. “Gosha’s brand is successful among youth because he always works with common teens from the street, spends time with them in order to understand and to hear them. In what they are interested and about what they care about at present time.”
But incidents like these can create—in the best of circumstances—uncomfortable questions around how the fashion industry operates. Where should the line be drawn: How young is too young? What’s acceptable to ask? And who contacts whom? Even if Rubchinskiy is telling the truth, and he was merely asking for photos that would be used for a street casting, is it acceptable for designers—for anyone—to make these requests?
What Rubchinskiy is accused of doing is so normalized within the fashion industry, according to Sara Ziff, founder of models’-rights group Model Alliance, that this kind of predatory act is common. “We hear almost every day from people who believe they have been the victim of a scam,” she wrote via e-mail. “Individuals pose as professional photographers, scouts, or agents to solicit photos or arrange meetings with aspiring models. In some cases, scam artists are engaged in sex trafficking under the guise of providing modeling opportunities.”
As the statement from Rubchinskiy’s representative explains, the success of Gosha’s brand is reliant on that connection to teenagers. And from a consumer perspective, it’s hard to ignore that many customers and publications, including ours, have valorized the way Rubchinskiy obsesses over youth culture.
Along with the statement, the representative also supplied GQ with screenshots of messages and comments from models who’ve worked with the designer in the past. Skater and model Timur Mirkarimov, who’s appeared in Gosha Rubchinskiy lookbooks and is a part of Paccbet, a Russian skate team for which Rubchinskiy creates branding, told GQ that a representative of the designer initially reached out about a modeling opportunity. Mirkarimov met Rubchinskiy and “nothing bad happened [during] the casting process and lookbook time.”
Another model, Slava Dolan, told GQ that he met the designer at a party through a friend, so he did not go through a casting process. Dolan added that he does message directly with Rubchinskiy and was never asked for the type of photos the designer asked for from Silfverling. Many of the models whom Rubchinskiy’s representative introduced to GQ echoed that they have communicated with Rubchinskiy on messaging apps and deny that anything inappropriate took place—which, of course, doesn’t prove Rubchinskiy’s innocence in the case of Silfverling and may only serve to emphasize that it isn’t an everyday way of conducting business.
The intensity with which spokespeople from the brand are responding to these accusations—by riffing on the statements provided to different outlets and compiling dozens of pieces of anecdotal evidence—puts a fine point on how desperately Gosha Rubchinskiy the brand needs Gosha Rubchinskiy the person.
If, as it appears, he’s truly done something predatory or malicious, Rubchinskiy will be part of a still-small group of individuals in the fashion industry called out for this type of behavior. While we’ve seen ripples of #MeToo in the fashion and modeling businesses, we’ve yet to see them undergo a deeper reckoning. While several big-name photographers have been accused of behaving inappropriately, Rubchinskiy is one of the first designers to come under fire. Ziff explained that complaints of sexual harassment and assault to the Model Alliance’s grievance reporting service are up 4,000 percent since October 2017—when the #MeToo movement started. She argued that the power dynamics built into the structure of the fashion and modeling industries make them “ripe for exploitation.” Not only is modeling unregulated, she said, but “add to that the aspirational nature of the business, what can be a sexually charged work environment, and the fact that most models are young and working far from home,” and behavior like what Silfverling’s screenshots depict runs rampant.
What Ziff describes is a murky, messy gray area covering much of an industry where the line between acceptable and predatory is so faint no one can quite explain which is which. That’s exactly the problem fashion needs to fix, and fast.