Ordure-à-Porter

Synchrodogs is the collaborative moniker used by Ukrainian photographers Tania Shcheglova and Roman Noven, an adorable couple who say they are “dating hard,” which (in our minds) involves pretending to be wood nymphs and having naked adventures in the forest with lots of tongue kissing, heavy petting, and eating all sorts of forbidden fruit growing from trees unknown to modern science. Tania emailed us recently to say, “Hey, we just took a bunch of pictures of this 42-year-old guy named Misha Koptev who makes clothing out of random crap he finds wherever.” While most people who wear clothes they find in dumpsters are known as “bums,” we were certain the young Synchrodogs would have nothing to do with such riffraff. They tracked down Misha (not an easy task because he is “drunk all the time”) in Lugansk, a crime-ridden city in eastern Ukraine with a population of 450,000. Misha’s been making clothes since 1993, but he doesn’t have a job or money, and one might argue that he doesn’t know shit about fashion because he can’t sew, didn’t study design, and doesn’t have access to TV, the internet, or magazines. He told Synchrodogs that “inspiration is bullshit” and proceeded to lock them in a room of his mother’s apartment, along with two 60-year-old gay men and some of his creations strewn among garbage, dirt, bugs, and animal bones. Then Misha left to have a drink with a cute boy and didn’t come back.