Ksenia Virganskaya said she was about to leave for St Petersburg to interview Catherine Deneuve for Grazia. Her younger sister, meanwhile, was preparing to fly off to an event in Versailles.
"It was not my goal to become a trendsetter," said Anastasia Virganskaya. "But now people write, 'Look at the Gorbachev girls, even their dog is a trendsetter.'" Other Muscovites have terriers, but the sisters have a toy dog called a papillon, she said.
Other It Girls inhabit the role more comfortably. Nina Gomiashvili, 35, a former child actress and the daughter of Archil Gomiashvili, a well-known comic actor and businessman, met a reporter at Gostinaya, a home-style cafe she owns that is decorated with hardwood floors and bird cages. At her new photography gallery, Pobeda (Victory), she presides in high style over the art openings dressed in Carolina Herrera or Loris Azzaro. The fashion photographers Ellen von Unwerth and Michel Comte each attended the openings of personal shows this year at her gallery, as did the Moscow A-list.
"I am a little bit privileged, I am from a good family," said Gomiashvili, who has a blond pageboy hairdo. "But I don't think your last name should work for you. I think you should work to make your last name memorable."
Chilingarova, the daughter of the polar explorer, is also working on her brand. Next week, she plans to introduce her own magazine, called Pride, for and about the Russian jet set.
"It's called Pride, not like Pride and Prejudice, but like a pride of lions because, in Russian, our name for people who go out is social lions," she said, using the Russian term for a social animal.
It was 1am on a Monday morning at the Hotel Metropol, in the VIP section of the after-party for a national fashion design competition called the Russian Silhouette awards. Chilingarova was lounging on a sofa by a coffee table laden with platters of smoked fish, red caviar and bottles of Champagne. Next to her sat another Moscow It Girl, Nadezhda Mikhalkova, an actress whose father, Nikita Mikhalkov, is an Oscar-winning film director and whose grandfather, Sergei Mikhalkov, wrote the lyrics to both the old Soviet and the new Russian national anthems.
"We are not all dumb, we are not all blond, but it's a hard job actually to go out and be photographed all of the time," said Chilingarova, who was leaving later in the week for Paris to attend a charity fund-raiser called the Louis XIV ball. "You can get tired of being photographed."
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