INSERT DESCRIPTIONA creation by Russian designer Antonina Shapovalova. (Photo: Alexander Natruskin/Reuters)
Paris, Milan, New York. Moscow?

Russian designers are now wrapping up their own fashion week, hoping that with the country’s new wealth and growing taste for fine clothes that they can begin to attract the kind of attention that has long been showered on their European counterparts.
It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.

Russian models, such Natalia Vodianova, have gained widespread acclaim in recent years, while several designers, including Aleksandr Terekhov and Denis Simachev, have become regulars in Milan and New York and opened stores from Kuwait to Japan to the United States.
The rise of the fashion industry has been fueled by the strong economy, itself a beneficiary of high oil prices, as well as a fashion-conscious public. Visitors to Moscow and St. Petersburg are often startled at how well-dressed Russian women are when compared to Americans. The domestic clothing market has been growing at 20 percent a year, and people here spend twice as much as other Europeans on clothes.

This year’s Fashion Week in Moscow featured prominent homegrown designers, who are trying to emerge after years of being overshadowed by Western labels.

Valentin Yudashkin and Igor Chapurin used their collections to emphasize the luxury and symbolism that seems to accompany anything linking Russia to its imperial past.

“Russian fashion has been given back to us, it’s arrived,” Mr. Yudashkin said.

Industry experts say the focus on Czarist themes could reflect a certain maturity within Russian fashion, and its new style and stars have moved past earlier incoherence when designers would throw fur at a jacket and call it haute couture.

A Czarist theme is also present in the new uniforms for Russia’s military, which Mr. Yudashkin and Mr. Chapurin designed and which are supposed to be “sexier” and more fashionable than Soviet style uniforms.

Mr. Yudashkin is popular not only with the public and the military, but also with the wife of Dmitri A. Medvedev, Russia’s next president, Svetlana, who is said to be a regular customer.

Of course, while it is unlikely that Moscow will eclipse Milan or New York as a capital of haute couture any time soon, Russian designers have already achieved one sign of success: they have to worry about counterfeiters.