In 1987, the Cold War had not yet ended, but cracks were forming. Italian photographer Ferdinando Scianna seized on that tension, traveling to Leningrad — now Saint Petersburg — for a fashion shoot unlike anything Western audiences had seen.
Scianna was already known for his humanistic style. He had little interest in sterile studio setups. Instead, he used Leningrad’s streets as his stage — Nevsky Prospekt, the canal bridges, and the sweeping face of the Winter Palace all became backdrops.
The models were not kept behind barriers. They walked the city’s pavements, posed on bridges, and stood among curious local onlookers. That contact with real street life gave the photos a raw, unscripted energy.
Western and Soviet faces appeared side by side in the shoot. That mix was deliberate. East and West were tentatively testing common ground, and Scianna’s lens documented that moment with precision.
The clothing ranged from timeless, tailored pieces to sharp contemporary designs. Placed against Leningrad’s 18th- and 19th-century architecture, those modern silhouettes created a direct visual contrast between old and new.
The city itself was rarely this visible to Western eyes. Leningrad’s grand canals and imperial squares had long been hidden behind the Iron Curtain. Scianna’s shoot let outsiders see them in an entirely unexpected context.
Street life crept into every frame. Passersby paused, shopfronts loomed in the background, and the grey Soviet sky stretched overhead. None of it was cleared away or hidden.
This was a rare cultural exchange, permitted during a period of cautious Soviet openness under Mikhail Gorbachev’s early reforms. A Western fashion crew operating openly in Leningrad would have been unthinkable just years before.
Scianna kept his eye on people as much as clothing. Faces, posture, and movement mattered to him. The garments were the assignment, but the city’s human texture was always in the frame.
Each location told its own story. The Winter Palace carried the weight of imperial Russia. The canals echoed the city’s nickname, the Venice of the North. Scianna placed fashion inside all of it without apology.
The result was a body of work that documented 1987 Leningrad as much as it sold clothes. The photos are a factual record of a specific city, at a specific political moment, seen through an Italian photographer’s uncompromising eye.
