The Raspberry blazer as the uniform of the New Russian

The origin of the “Raspberry Blazer” as the iconic dresscode of “New Russians” is somewhat disputed. Some believe that the fashion was initiated in 1991 at the gameshow Chto? Gde? Kogda? [“What? Where? When?] (see Artifact #00214). That year, the show turned into an “intellectual casino” which was claimed to be “the only place in Russia where one could earn money with the power of their mind.” As a symbol of success on the show, each season’s voted best player would be gifted a raspberry blazer, along with the title of “immortal member” of the What? Where When? club. Within just a few years, the blazers on the set of Chto? Gde? Kogda? would be entirely replaced by tuxedos, in that way highlighting even further the idea that former Soviet engineers were turning into wealthy post-Soviet aristocrats, whose financial success was justified on the basis of their command of culturedness, taste, erudition, etc. At about the same time, the newspaper Kommersant and its side-project Domovoi was doing similar work in its attempt to imagine and target “New Russians” (see artifact #00044).
The problem was that the term “New Russians” never stuck to the kind of people that were celebrated by either Chto? Gde? Kogda? or Kommersant. Rather, it described white-collar criminal businessmen (at best), or outright racketeers (at worst). For both, the raspberry blazer became common attire, and its prominence was more likely the result of efforts by Gianni Versace and Sergei Mavrodi. On the first count, raspberry blazers were present in the Versace Men’s collection in 1991 and 1992. Given Versace’s self-evident primacy for those interested in conspicuous consumption, it is not at all a surprise that his suits– and many more knockoffs– entered the Russian market at the time. On the second count,, it has often been said that the popularity of the raspberry blazer was sealed by Sergei Mavrodi, the founder оf Shareholder Company “MMM,” who appeared in it for his season’s greetings on the 1994 New Year’s Eve. Mavrodi was a perfect example of someone who tried to present as a “New Russian” in Kommersant’s sense of the world, but was in fact a classic 1990’s white-collar criminal, who flooded the airwaves with advertisements for MMM shares, always promising returns that were too good to be true, but was in fact peddling a ponzi scheme that collapsed in mid-1994, defrauding millions of Russians (see Artifact #00014). A taste for raspberry blazers, meanwhile, survived unscathed, as evinced by Aleksei Balabanov’s decision to dress his villain in one, in his 1997 movie Brother, which is widely recalled as Russia’s most iconic film of this decade.