Moscow Gets Fashionable.

Inside Victoria Andreyanova's Moscow boutique, the decor as well as the best-selling clothes are spartan and understated. Amid soft lighting, a Sinead O'Connor disc spins on a chrome CD player. Andreyanova meets her clients in the boutique's sleek underground cafe, where she shows them her tailored blazers and skirts, made mainly of Scottish tweed. The 40- year-old designer wears only the lightest of makeup, her hair cut in a simple blond bob. In a scene that would have been unimaginable a few years ago, a group of Italian cloth salesmen is gathered outside her door, suitcases full of exquisite material in hand. She keeps them waiting as she ruminates on the current state of Russian fashion. "Moscow's rich are tired of being showoffs," she says. "Everyone gorged on whatever they could in the '90s, and now they don't want to look like they're trying so hard. But don't get me wrong: everyone still wants to be noticed."

Not long ago the best way to get noticed in Russia was to wear a purple suit jacket, gold chains or the popular stiletto-miniskirt combination that endured even subzero windstorms. But these days, feather boas and white knee-high boots are losing out to the quieter charms of tweed and polished leather. In-your-face consumption is passe, disdained as an excess of the high-rolling gaudiness that followed the Soviet Union's collapse. Now prestige is marked by cool minimalism and "class." "Style is a reflection on the values of your community," says Levinson. "And what we see here is a high value on normalcy."

What's more, competition has finally hit the fashion marketplace. Muscovites once again have money to spend, thanks to high oil prices and a bit of distance from the 1998 financial crash. And they are spending it increasingly in European boutiques, which seem to open in Moscow on a weekly basis. But it's not just the wealthy "new Russians"- -the elite group that made fast cash as the Soviet state was falling apart--who are taking advantage of the proliferation of Western shops. While chains like the Gap and Banana Republic have not yet arrived, a number of stores--including Naf Naf, Levi's and TJ Collection--have broadened access to Western fashions beyond the superrich. Even secondhand shops selling chic European clothing are beginning to crop up. In Moscow, the stilettoed, gangster-chic look is slowly fading away. "The idea of the 'new Russians' is starting to vanish," says Alexey Levinson, a sociologist and trend specialist with the Russian Center for Public Opinion and Marketing Research. "They are dissolving and creating a sort of upper-middle-class way of life." (Whether such a class even exists in Russia is the subject of heated debate--but in Moscow at least, the term definitely applies.)

The shift can be measured by the dramatic change in Russian tastes. When the cash first started flowing in the early 1990s, the style of post-Soviet capitalist cowboys was "pretty awful," says Levinson. "Take [oligarch-in-exile] Boris Berezovsky. He had two higher degrees--but even he didn't know how to wear a suit. How could he?" After all, Russia's nouveau riche had no examples to follow. "Social circumstances changed overnight, and those who got money created a new social class, where there were no rules yet," says Levinson. Like the nouveau riche in any country, they were drawn to flashy displays of wealth. Brands that were considered lower class in the West were prized in Moscow, simply because they were Western and previously inaccessible. The ravenous consumption of everything new, regardless of cost, spawned the popular "new Russian" joke of the mid-'90s, in which two men compare what they paid for an Italian tie: the one who spent $500 instead of $1,000 was furious that he got ripped off.

It's getting a bit harder to make jokes about Russian style now. These days, Muscovites want to--and can--wear the same clothes as Western Europeans and Americans, whether they buy them at Yves Saint Laurent or at a used-clothing store. Vladimir Kozhokaz, 25, is a coffeehouse hipster whose lime green cargo pants ...