Moscow is Becoming the New Capital of Cool

Fashion and attitude are on display at the Opera nightclub.

On the exterior wall of the old House of Culture building, a stony Lenin gazes over the last generation of Young Pioneers to come of age in Russia: pretty boys in wraparound shades and dolled-up girls with fake tans and fake eyelashes, all of them queued up and brimming with hope that tonight they will make it past Face Control.

It is 2 a.m., and the entrance to the Opera nightclub is guarded by a half-dozen sentries in nylon army fatigues and steel-toe boots and earpieces. But they are not as formidable as the gatekeeper in the bespoke suit who scrutinizes the partygoers like a cop inspecting a car wreck. Pass the test, and you can join the undulating crowd inside; get rejected and you're discarded like fashion road kill. Evgenia, 22, is one of the lucky ones to be waved inside. She checks her blond curls in one of five entrance mirrors, grabs her friend's hand, and makes straight for the dance floor, turning back only to cry, "Moscow never sleeps!"

Forget the old clichés about vodka, gangsters, and bears—Moscow certainly has. In the new century, the Russian capital has reinvented itself as a 24-hour, champagne-guzzling Vegas-meets-Gotham, where through the night you can eat sushi, work out at the gym, buy organic cereal at a glittering supermarket, or get your hair cut. Soaring oil prices and the rise of real income (as well as the introduction of credit cards) have ushered change to the capital faster and more dramatically than anywhere else in the former Soviet Union.

Making up for lost time. Frenetic, protean, and above all striving, the onetime global capital of communism is vying for recognition as the new global capital of cool. "People have a lot of choice now—where to eat, shop, go on vacation," says Natalia Tikhonova, 25, Opera's permed and high-heeled PR manager, while Moscow's golden youth jostle to get the bartender's attention inside the cavernous theater of the club. A vodka mixed with Red Bull costs 500 rubles ($22). A table in the VIP section can run upward of $2,000, but it buys the best view of the blond acrobat who, a little after 3 a.m., descends from the ceiling clinging to a fishing net. Dressed in a lamé outfit, she twists and flips and does the splits midair like a Cirque du Soleil act as blue and white confetti rains from above. As Tikhonova says, "Moscow is a city of opportunity, a city where you can realize yourself."

It is a city that is frantically trying, it seems, to make up for lost time. "For my parents, the dream was to have an apartment in the center of Moscow with a view of the Kremlin," says Opera's party promoter, Alexei "Limousine" (a nom de guerre the 24-year-old adopted on the frontlines of the party scene). He puts down his drink and proudly shows off his Dolce & Gabbana jeans, Gucci belt, and black Prada loafers. "My dream is to be Roman Abramovich," he says, referring to the billionaire oil tycoon and owner of England's Chelsea Football Club. To afford his aspirational lifestyle—and designer wardrobe—Alexei works a day job "in insurance."

Still, the new Moscow at times feels like it has been plastered over the old Moscow like a coat of fresh paint on a pockmarked wall. The streets have been renamed to reflect a less communist Russia, but vestiges of the former system still linger. For two weeks every summer, unlucky Muscovites must boil their bathwater on stovetops while the city cleans their pipes. The avenues—built at a time when the average wait for a Lada automobile was five years and most people didn't drive—are unable to accommodate the nearly 4 million cars now registered in Moscow. Many phone lines still operate on rotary dial, not to mention that sorting out a problem with your phone bill might mean traveling to the other side of this vast city, only to stand in line. Yes, people here still stand in line, sometimes for hours at a time.

These days, the robber barons who once made headlines for their plundering and their partying are talking the talk of legitimate businessmen—corporate governance, transparency, investment—at international businesses conferences all across the city. There are 74 billionaires in Moscow—more than in New York—and they have an average age of 46.

And the dollars and euros pour in, as do the traveling merchants. Matthias Rüthmüller, director of a Swiss-based contemporary art gallery, brought several dramatic, large-scale canvases to the recent Moscow World Fine Art Fair, which showed 6,000 works of art worth some $1.6 billion at the Manezh Exhibition Hall. "Russians really like to spend money," says Rüthmüller. "They want prestige, and they are convinced their country has a bright future."

On the lower level of the Manezh, which once served as the tsar's horse stables, Russian jeweler Maxim Voznesensky hosted an auction of his contemporary designs. Tuxedoed waiters served canapés and flutes of bubbly while the auctioneer, actor Leonid Yarmolnik—the self-styled "Russian Robert De Niro"—pushed one lot after another, upping bids $20,000 at a time.

The auction heated up when two men zeroed in on a set of four diamond rings encrusted with rubies and sapphires. Ignoring the auctioneer, they started shouting out their bids in intervals of $100,000, until the lot finally sold to the bald gentleman in the front for $3.65 million. The audience erupted in applause and the buyer made a little bow. He looked very pleased with himself, though not as pleased as the designer. In under an hour, he sold off 10 lots for a total of $8.97 million. "When we're talking about people spending that much money on jewelry and they're not trying to hide it, as they would have in Soviet times, it is a sign that the country is becoming healthy and starting to grow stronger," says Yarmolnik over a post-auction cigarette. "People are spending money for their amusement, not just for their survival. When you can spend your money any way you want, this is freedom."

Signs of prosperity. If two decades ago the buzzword for freedom was McDonald's, today it is McDacha, the opulent homes with the imported Italian furniture. "Look around you," says Anya Jirnova, 25, a beauty salon manager shopping at the Evropeisky Center. She sweeps her hand vaguely over the glistening storefronts of the 2 million-square-foot megamall, where international designer shops are clustered around areas named London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome. "If you have the money, you can buy anything here."

Meanwhile, on the Old Arbat, the storied pedestrian thoroughfare where Russia's beloved bard Pushkin once lived, the scene is a hodgepodge of peddlers and tattoo parlors and mongrel dogs and tourists and fast-food joints. A Starbucks latte will set you back 175 rubles (about $8). On summer weekends, young men in basketball jerseys break-dance to hip-hop music pouring out of a silv er boom box in front of the Hard Rock Cafe. Nearby, a souvenir seller hawks fur hats and Simpsons ties and nesting dolls lacquered with Russia's pop culture icons: Stalin, Che, Harry Potter. A recent addition to his wares: Russia's new president, Dmitry Medvedev, inside of whom is a smaller Putin, followed by Yeltsin and Gorbachev. Lenin is the smallest—smaller than a thimble—but in what seems like an apt metaphor, he is still inside all of them.

At 4 a.m., Moscow's young boulevardiers are still pouring into the Opera line to brave Face Control. The pink-blue of dawn brings with it a rare stillness to the capital—even the dogs in the alleyways are sleeping—and the driver of the "VIP Taxi" parked cater-cornered on the sidewalk is slumped over the wheel of his pumpkin-colored Porsche Cayenne, trying to steal a nap before the night comes to a close. Inside Opera, DJ Erick E, a Dutch import, blasts techno music at decibels that make the floor vibrate, while go-go dancers in pink pleather and leopard-print and rhinestone-studded bikinis sway to the oontz-oontz-oontz under the flash of a strobe light. The kaleidoscopic vortex pulsates with the hope that the party never ends.