When murder was in fashion: Introducing Irfé, the Russian luxury clothing label with a deadly past...



Felix and Irina's granddaughter Xenia Sfiris (left) and current creative director Olga Sorokina at the Renaissance of the Fashion House Irfé show in Paris, 2008

Anywhere the moneyed of Eastern Europe shop, from Chelsea and Palm Beach to the Urals, you’ll find an Irfé boutique. Since 2008, the Paris-based Russian luxury-clothing label – praised by Alexa Chung as ‘clever, fluid and architectural’ – has been expanding its empire and is now sold in 80 outlets worldwide, with its owner and creative director, Belarussian ex-model Olga Sorokina, often snapped at parties in Cannes, Milan, Paris, Moscow and in Los Angeles at Oscar time.

She describes Irfé’s signature look as ‘aristocratic romanticism’. A slim silhouette on the lower body is typically offset by a voluminous upper half. Designs are inspired by Russian ballet, art and culture – the intricate styling of Fabergé jewels, traditional embroidery, firebirds and double-headed eagles – and reworked with a modern ‘baroque ’n’ roll’ feel.

It’s a look that appeals to rich young Muscovites yearning for a closer connection to Russia’s pre-communist heritage. The brand itself was born at the end of that era, founded in the 1920s by one of the country’s most glamorous and notorious aristocratic couples.



Irina, princess of Russia, was the beautiful niece of the last tsar, and her handsome husband Felix Youssoupoff, once the richest man in Russia, was the playboy aristocrat who’d murdered the peasant mystic Rasputin. In exile after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the pair embarked on a dress-design business in Paris (the first two letters of their Christian names forming the title).

Irfé was a hit with American and British customers in Paris during the années folles, when fashion took its lead from Coco Chanel. Punters flocked to Irfé to look a murderer in the eye and buy clothes designed and modelled by a princess. They wanted to hear how Felix and fellow-conspirators, including his friend the Grand Duke Dmitri, had lured Rasputin to the cellar of his St Petersburg palace, in the vain hope that by killing the empress’s unpopular favourite they could save Russia from revolution. Felix would regale them with details of how they plied Rasputin with wine laced with cyanide, then shot him, before drowning him in the River Neva. The ineffectual tsar’s punishment was merely to send them out of town.

Irfé’s customers were also intrigued by the killer’s wife, who married the charming cross-dresser as an innocent 18-year-old (too young to understand the word homosexual). But anyone hoping for the tears of a princess was left disappointed: in the many photographs of Irina in Irfé designs, or out and about with her husband, her expression is always serene.

People continue to enjoy the story behind the label, but in a country whose richest citizens still worry about being exiled themselves (a fate that has befallen several oligarchs at odds with the modern Kremlin), it is Irina’s story that resonates.



Irfé founder Irina Youssoupoff wearing one of her evening dresses, 1924. Paris loved the clothes – one reporter wrote that Irfe ranked among the great fashion houses

Russian vividness and European chic combine in the autumn/winter 2013 collection

Nothing about Irina’s early life suggested she would prove so adaptable. Until she married Felix, she was desperately shy. The Romanov clan to which she belonged had been dominated by the huge, red-faced and repressive Alexander III. His son, the ruling Nicholas II, remained a timid soul, but still tried to crack the autocrat’s whip, exiling any relative who stood up to him or who married a non-royal. Romanov family members seethed – but in silence. As one observer noted: ‘They spoke six languages but nobody ever said anything.’

Irina’s family were among the exiles. She spent her early teens in the South of France after her father fell out with his imperial brother-in-law. After six years, the family returned and Irina’s painful shyness stood out even among her tongue-tied relatives. So it astonished everyone when, in 1913, she suddenly announced that she wanted to marry the scandalous Felix Youssoupoff, eight years her senior, whom she’d met once as a child, and again only after his recent return from studying at Oxford.

The rich, blue-blooded Felix didn’t know the meaning of timidity. Rather than join the army, he preferred opium dens, nightclubs and orgies. As a child, he’d liked dressing up – and it continued into adulthood. He took to singing in nightclubs wearing his mother’s fabulous jewels.

Yet Felix found himself attracted to Irina’s dazzling beauty and shyness. ‘I was sure that she was my fate,’ he wrote. He confessed his past amours to her. He said in his memoirs later that she forgave him everything.

Unsurprisingly, Irina’s parents breathed a sigh of relief when Felix’s friend Grand Duke Dmitri (who, unlike Felix, was a senior royal, an Olympic athlete and a dashing soldier) also proposed to Irina. But she insisted on Felix. The tsar gave in and they married before the First World War broke out. They had a daughter – also called Irina but known as Bébé – in 1915.

Felix and Irina just after their wedding. Punters flocked to the Irfé atelier in Paris to look a murderer in the eye and buy clothes designed by a princess...

The Youssoupoffs’ marriage lasted half a century. Commentators can seldom resist calling this ‘somewhat surprising’, but Irina’s background offers some explanation. Her escape into Felix’s energetic, playful life was a vote for adventure and fun – and an escape from the royal misery all Romanovs knew too well.

With Felix, Irina immediately found new courage. She knew all about the Rasputin murder plan. Their letters show they both thought Irina would join the conspirators on the murder night in 1916 (she cried off with nerves).

After the first of two 1917 revolutions, the Youssoupoffs travelled from their southern estate to St Petersburg, so that Irina could bravely complain to the new government that they were mistreating her family, while Felix boldly reclaimed various family treasures – including two Rembrandts, which he cut from their frames – from homes that were now under revolutionary surveillance.

Irfé, run on a wing and a prayer, was simply more of this scary sort of fun for the Youssoupoffs, who by 1921 had moved to Paris with many other exiles – including Dmitri, who had begun an affair with Coco Chanel, persuading her to employ several Russian princesses, among them his sister. In return, Dmitri brought her luck. In 1921, she brought out Chanel No 5, a revolutionary perfume that moved away from florals and musks. Legend has it this was Dmitri’s inspiration – he’d described the Russian notion of a ‘deceitful’ scent, defying definition, and she’d had one made.



Felix and Irina in 1934 examining a film strip from Rasputin and the Empress - they successfully sued the makers MGM

We can’t know whether Dmitri’s dabbling in fashion was what prompted Felix and Irina to go one better and set up a couture house. Although Dmitri and Felix had plotted to kill Rasputin, their friendship – once so close it was whispered they’d been lovers – had soured into rivalry after Felix’s marriage to Irina. Certainly, the Irfé perfumes were in bottles with faceted corners, dangerously like Chanel’s.

The Youssoupoffs had lost most of their wealth to the Bolsheviks, but they’d left Russia with the two Rembrandts, Marie Antoinette’s earrings and a black pearl once owned by Catherine the Great. They also had a Knightsbridge flat, a house and car in Switzerland and other precious odds and ends that they gradually sold off. Like the rest of a class raised with no idea of what to do with money except spend it, they had little business sense.

Felix, whose life was one long party, got Irfé off the ground in 1924 after selling valuables to Americans. He used unemployed Russian princes and princesses to do the modelling and beading of the clothes, along with the freakish servants he hired because their antics amused him. Felix’s memoirs describe Irfé’s rise and fall as one big joke. But in the middle of that joke is Irina, forbearing, lending the enterprise her elegance and seriousness.

There was no money for publicity. So, still sewing the first collection, Irina and her princess-model friends rushed to a ball at the Ritz where there was to be a fashion show, and joined in.



Olga preparing for the Renaissance of the Fashion House Irfé show in Paris, 2008, left. And at the Oscars earlier this year

Paris loved the clothes. One French reporter wrote: ‘Originality, refined taste, meticulous work and an artistic sense of colour place this atelier in the ranks of the great houses of fashion.’

Irfé moved to Rue Duphot, in Paris’s fashion centre. Felix decorated the atelier pale grey, while Irina gave socially aspiring punters the impression they were wandering into her boudoir by adding touches such as crystal bottles and Irfé shawls draped on armchairs, as if left by chance.

Slim and boyish, Irina was the epitome of the 1920s look and Irfé clothes reflected her taste. Recalling her style, Russian-born Princess Tatiana von Metternich – a childhood friend of Bébé’s – said, ‘Ephemeral, draped in silk dresses trimmed with fringe, with an ageless face like her husband’s, she reminded one of a cameo. But sometimes, losing her usual restraint, she dispelled her charm with a dry remark uttered in a low Romanov voice.’

The 1925 collection consisted of painted silk batik dresses, cut like Russian peasant shirts. The next season it was bead-embroidered evening dresses, sportswear, perfume and fabric belts.

Irfé accessories capture that bold, colourful Russian aesthetic



Although the cut and patterns were old-fashioned for the short-skirted art-deco period, the long silhouettes and elegance of Irina’s styling were still popular, and she became famous and much photographed.

Felix handled the clients and opened three new branches of Irfé, in Le Touquet, London and Berlin (his friend, Princess Thurn und Taxis, ran this branch somewhat unpredictably – even Felix was taken aback when she took him trawling transvestite clubs for models). He also opened three restaurants and a porcelain shop.

‘We knew nothing about sewing but the business flourished,’ Felix wrote. His eccentric servant Andrew Bull, a half-English, half-Russian refugee, did the admin so carelessly ‘that it was always chaos’. Bull forgot to deliver the invitations to Irfé’s first show on Rue Duphot, so no one turned up. Yet soon Irfé had so many orders that Felix rented more space.

But trouble was in store. In 1927, Felix’s first book detailing the killing of Rasputin turned the Russians of Paris against him, and the overstretched business suffered a financial crisis. Irfé was saved by a cheque from an American friend, Rosamund, the new Mrs William Kissam Vanderbilt II. She had been living discreetly in Paris while her millionaire husband-to-be divorced his first wife in New York. Now that she’d finally married her man at Paris City Hall she was feeling generous. But in 1928, a libellous article about Felix’s financial and sexual affairs caused more damage.

The well-cut dresses Irfé produced for 1928-29 were still featured in Vogue Paris, but Irina was depressed by the death of her grandmother, the Dowager Empress of Russia, and by the Bolsheviks auctioning off some of their belongings in Berlin, and Felix had been swept up into unruly Bohemian Paris. For a while, Irfé was kept afloat by Mrs Hannah Whoobee, an Egyptian millionairess.

She bought the Youssoupoffs’ house (they moved into the annex), giving them enough cash to stagger on.



Tsar Alexander III and Empress Marie Fedorovna with their children, including Nicholas, centre back, and Irina's mother Xenia, second from right

Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was Felix's fellow conspirator in the murder of Rasputin, pictured right

But even that didn’t last. Irfé was wound up two years after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, unable to survive without its American clients, who had vanished. Felix would later joke: ‘I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t cut out for business!’ But it wasn’t total defeat. In creating a narrower, elongated feminine silhouette at the end of the 1920s, Irina had predicted the lines of the next decade.

Soon after Irfé’s collapse, however, the Youssoupoffs made a big financial gain. In 1934, they successfully sued MGM studios over a film about the murder of Rasputin. Its suggestion that the mystic had seduced a royal princess was, Irina said, a libel against her. They made enough money to live on for the rest of their lives.

In later life, Irina didn’t always appear happy. As Felix grew more outrageous – Noel Coward sniped that Prince Youssoupoff wore so much make-up that bits kept cracking off into his soup – she retreated into herself. She chain-smoked and became painfully thin.

She did, however, enjoy parts of the Bohemian, free life that her eccentric husband had opened up

for her. She liked their summers in a tumbledown Corsican property. She kept an open house for arty guests, until Felix’s death in 1967.

That Irina loved her husband is clear from the touching final glimpse of her, in the French film that Felix finally allowed to be made about the Rasputin murder just before his death. Gaunt but composed, she sits beside her blind husband, who’s wearing a Blues Brothers-style suit and sunglasses. They’re describing the long-ago killing of the peasant.

‘Princess, did you know in advance about your husband’s plan?’ the interviewer asks. Rather wearily, she replies, ‘I knew.’ It is only with the next question that she livens up. ‘Did you support it?’ comes the French voice. Suddenly glowing with utter loyalty, she gives the firm answer, ‘Yes.’

The new Irfé, which relaunched eight decades after its predecessor, is a testament to the strength of the Youssoupoffs’ marriage as well as to their fashion house. Olga Sorokina runs Irfé with the blessing of the Youssoupoffs’ granddaughter, Bébé’s only daughter Xenia Sfiris. Having stumbled on the story of Irfé in a book in 2006, Olga was so enthused that she approached Xenia offering to revive the family firm. ‘This introduction to the Youssoupoffs’ granddaughter,’ the Irfé website states, ‘became the turning-point in Olga Sorokina’s life.’ It brought the story of the Youssoupoff family full circle, too. Russian design based in Paris; style – but this time without the scandal.

Vanora Bennett’s novel Midnight in St Petersburg is published by Century



