Russia in VOGUE exhibition at MAMM Moscow

Russian influence on the style of VOGUE, on the history of the world's fashion and on the development of photography and graphic design is huge.

For more than a century of the magazine's history, thousands of Russian faces and Russian names have been published on the pages of VOGUE's international editions. Russian in VOGUE exhibition will include portraits of famous Russians (...). These portraits are unexpected and diverse - from Ida Rubinstein to Joseph Brodsky, from Erte to Vladimir Nabukov, from Gala Dali to Vassily Kandinsky. At the exhibition we will show the fashionable shots inspired by Russia and the unique reports shot by great photographers in the USSR during the "Iron Curtain" period. We will demonstrate how triumphantly Russian supermodels conquered the world. We will select the works of Russian artists and fashion designers which have appeared on the pages of international editions of VOGUE. We will talk about the designer collections created under Russian influence, such as the famous "Russian Seasons" by Yves Saint Laurent.

The magic of RIO - Pirelli Calendar 2013 - at MAMM Moscow

Photographer: Steve McCurry

The Rio depicted here suggests the history of Brazil, a country transformed - colonized, plundered and repopulated until it exploded with European and African intensities as well as all indigenous feathered shrieks. The photos show a homegrown culture of impulses and improvisations - syncretic, an anthropologist might say , a fusion of cultures, a people taking possession of different rituals or beliefs and making them their own. That too is magical. The music and dance and even the graffiti adds to the transformation; the human touch in the painted walls, the casual dress is the Cariocas' assertion of their own lives and their neighborhoods, turning their walls into murals and even their bodies into art objects, as body builders and dancers.

The capoeira - shown here as vigorous tumbling - is distinctly Brazilian and centuries old, combining movement and music that is both an aesthetic and a system of combat, like magic in action: a martial art, sometimes improvisational and artful. And the graffiti is not (as in some cities vandalism), but an enhancement, mural or maquillage on a wall, a street, in alcoves and markets, on the rooftops.

Here are images of abundance - plenty of everything, food, fruit, colour, music; an abundance of light, too, but sometimes wayward and revealing light. The young girl at the market stall, anxiously clutching her head, stands before an impressive pile of multicoloured peppers, She is alone, but so are many of other people in the city, especially  the solitary air of the woman talking away, along the Arcos de Lapa aqueduct, with a teasing suggestion of 'follow me'. She is a telling shadow; there is as much life in these shadows as in naked light.