Lena Makashova at Russian Fashion Week March 2006

Lena Makashova showed at Russian Fashion Week in March 2006, in the designer showcase linked above. The record holds two runway photographs of the show, pictured by Maria Valentino, Firstview, and provided by Russian Fashion Week. She is the Elena Makashova of the 2005 showcase — her 2005 record, under that name and with her full biography, is in this guide and linked from this page.

The 2005 biography gives the depth behind this short record: born in Moscow in 1952, a career built across the Soviet and post-Soviet industry, and the Lena Makashova Fashion House opened in 1990 — the house whose name this March 2006 billing carries in its short form.

Illustrative image created for this guide — an artistic impression, not photographs from this show.

One Designer, Two Names in the Guide

The two billings are a small lesson in reading fashion archives: seasons list designers as the programme prints them, and the same designer can stand under a full name in one season and its familiar short form in the next. Kept together, the records show a designer of the founding generation still showing in March 2006 — more than fifteen years after opening her own fashion house, on the national runway her generation's industry built.

The name question cuts the other way as well: without the link between the billings, a reader could take Elena Makashova and Lena Makashova for two designers — a mother-house founder and a newcomer, perhaps — and the archive would have split one career into two phantoms. The records prevent that by cross-referencing each other plainly, under both names, so the woman who opened her fashion house in 1990 and the name printed on the March 2006 programme stay visibly, verifiably the same person.

Photos