Anastasia Romantsova

We are selling, not closing the A La Russe brand. These are completely different things.

The strategic hook #

Anastasia Romantsova is not the story of a founder who triumphed and stayed. She is the story of a founder who named something nobody else had articulated — that “Russian style” could mean aristocratic, pre-revolutionary romanticism rather than a folk costume — and then, a decade later, chose to end the house she built rather than let it collapse under her. Most founder profiles resolve into vindication: the crisis survived, the business intact. Romantsova’s resolves into departure, stated on her own terms. That distinction is the entire point of her story. When the fashion press described A La Russe’s 2020 sale, the framing available to them was failure — a Moscow atelier quietly liquidated. Romantsova refused that framing in public, in real time, insisting on a different verb: not closing, selling. Whether a reader believes that reframing is honest or convenient, it reveals a founder whose real subject was never fabric or silhouette. It was agency — the right to decide how her own story ended, even when the ending was an ending.

Origin and catalyst #

Romantsova did not train as a designer. She studied international relations at Kuban State University, a degree that pointed toward embassies and trade missions, not runways. Fashion found her sideways, through its production side rather than its design tables: in 2008 she joined Artefakt, the company organizing Moscow’s fashion weeks, and began hosting Modny Bazar, a television programme covering the industry from backstage. She learned what made a collection sell, what a buyer looked for, how a show was built — the mechanics of the business — years before she designed a single garment of her own.

The private conviction came earlier than the company did, and it unsettled her. She had begun to form her own view of what Russian style should mean, and it was not the view anyone around her seemed to share: not matryoshkas, not ushanka hats, not the folkloric shorthand foreign buyers expected and Russian designers kept supplying. Her own bold thoughts, she would later say, had started to frighten her — not because they felt wrong, but because they felt like too much certainty for someone who hadn’t yet built anything. The permission she needed arrived, unexpectedly, at a Higher School of Economics lecture on brand management in 2009. The critic Godfrey Deeny told a room of Russian designers to mine their own culture rather than imitate the West. It was not a novel idea in the abstract. For Romantsova, hearing it stated aloud by an outside authority gave her private thought its licence. A few months later, before she had a company to produce anything, a buyer from Yekaterinburg bought her entire debut showroom collection outright. She had to scramble to deliver on a promise made before the capacity to keep it existed — her first trial by fire, and proof that trusting the instinct mattered more than having a plan.

Crisis and transformation #

The house she founded in April 2010 succeeded on the strength of the same conviction that had once frightened her. A La Russe built its identity on aristocratic, Diaghilev-era romanticism — silk, lace, cashmere, a salon-style flagship recreating a nineteenth-century drawing room — precisely the register she had privately believed in and publicly avoided stating for a decade. By 2013 the position had been externally validated: Glamour named her Designer of the Year, three years after a standing start. By 2016, at the operation’s peak scale of roughly a hundred people and its own Moscow production line, Romantsova was candid about where the credit belonged. Without the family, she said, nothing would have worked — an admission that punctures any myth of the solitary visionary. The self-doubt of 2009 had resolved, for a while, into a business built on other people’s belief in her as much as her own.

Then her life relocated. In 2019 she began living mostly in Los Angeles, and the operation’s centre of gravity — the founder who had to be physically present in Moscow for every fitting, every production decision — started to drift with her. She began, quietly, to consider selling. When the moment came in early 2020, she made a choice that most departing founders do not get to make cleanly: she stated it publicly, on her own terms, before anyone else could name it for her. “We are selling, not closing the A La Russe brand,” she said. “These are completely different things.” Rather than let the company wind down into bankruptcy, she sold it sequentially — production to one buyer, the atelier to another, the Patriarshie Prudy boutique to a third — dismantling her own house deliberately, piece by piece, rather than watching it collapse as a single failure. It was the same instinct that had let her trust an unproven conviction in 2009: better to choose the ending than to have it chosen for her.

The personal reckoning did not end there. Years after the business was settled, a second and more private crisis arrived. Around the New Year of 2025–26, Romantsova wrote publicly of the end of her seventeen-year relationship with Mark Garber — the financier who had bankrolled A La Russe from its earliest years, and the father of her son. She described “enormous pain inflicted by a person I trusted for seventeen years,” and said he had deployed lawyers and connections in an attempt to strip her of “peace, financial stability, security — and the most precious, my child.” The rupture was total — partner, financier, and co-parent, ending at once — a reminder that the woman who had once feared her own convictions had, by her late thirties, learned to state hard things in public more than once.

Founding and validation #

What connects the young designer whose thoughts frightened her to the woman who announced her own company’s sale is a consistent operating style: conviction first, plan second. She did not wait for market research to tell her that aristocratic romanticism would outsell folk costume — she waited for one lecture’s worth of permission, then built on instinct. She did not wait for a governance structure or a succession plan to protect the business from her own eventual departure — there wasn’t one, and when the moment to leave arrived, she simply made the decision and executed it in the open. The family backing she credited at the 2016 peak was real, but so was the absence of any structure beyond her own presence; the business was, by design or by neglect, a single-founder operation with no plan for a future she wasn’t running personally. When distance made that arrangement untenable, the same trust-your-instinct-over-your-plan pattern that had launched the company also closed it — this time articulated as a decision rather than discovered as a crisis.

Future trajectory #

Romantsova’s exit demonstrates something narrower and more useful than the standard founder-triumph arc: that walking away on stated terms is itself a form of success, distinct from either failure or vindication. A house that never achieved a managed succession, that depended entirely on one founder’s presence and one set of convictions, did not have to end in bankruptcy or scandal. It could end in a sale she named herself, in an order she chose, while she moved on to a life in Los Angeles the business could no longer accommodate. The trademark she once built into a national aesthetic remains hers, dormant, unused since 2020 — a retained asset rather than an abandoned one, available if she or a future buyer ever wants to reactivate what she once dared, quietly, to believe in.

Last updated: July 27, 2026