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Alla Verber, the fashion director of the Moscow Central Department Store, died in Italy on August 6. She was the first to bring  Western fashion brands to Russia: Giorgio Armani, Dolce & Gabbana, Chanel, and many others. 

The "Glamour" magazine has  named Alla Verber  the main "fashion influencer" of Russia this year. And the point  is not in  the huge budgets that her employers spent on advertising in the media. Verber was really inspired, respected and loved by everyone: TSUM colleagues, arrogant fashion editors, luxury clients, young people giggling over memes and completely ordinary women.

Her Instagram was much livelier than the accounts of similar-looking young fashion divas. Alla's catchphrases and hashtags were printed on T-shirts. They say that Alla decided to start her Instagram when she realized that the fashion industry was reoriented to young people, and immediately replayed young bloggers on their own field. 



Alla Verber always loved fashion, especially in its most luxurious manifestations. 

Being a little girl in St. Petersburg, she carefully studied the outfits of foreign tourists. Later,  her parents, decided to emigrate and leave  the USSR, so living in  Rome Alla fell in love with the Gucci brand, popular among the local elite. She started to dream of bringing it to Russia. Having settled in Toronto, she quickly decided to connect her life with fashion - and already at the age of 26 she owned her own clothing store.



In the first half of the 1990s, in Russia, Alla got the idea to create a street of boutiques - like on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles. The owners of the Mercury company, then pioneers, and now practically monopolists in the field of luxury retail in Russia, shared her idea. So the first boutiques appeared on Kutuzovsky Prospekt and Tretyakovsky passage in Moscow. The Central Department Store  was updated;  Barvikha Luxury Village and the Leningrad Trade House (DLT) in St. Petersburg appeared.

Thanks to the persistence of Verber, such brands as Fendi, Chloe, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Gucci and many others appeared in Russia. She brought to Russia more than 500 brands from the most famous to unknown, but promising. 

What is more, Verber did not forget about Russian designers. Thanks to Alla Verber, such brands as Vika Gazinskaya, Terexov, Ruban and others appeared at TSUM.  With Verber, the ordinary department store with unfriendly saleswomen selling souvenirs in the 1990s turned into one of the best department stores in the world.



Verber was very rarely mistaken; according to her colleagues, she had an incredible instinct - she felt what Russian women would like or not.  

The fashion director of TSUM was loved and respected not only in the fashion world - there was no snobbery or arrogance in her.  

She openly talked about many problems she had in life - being   a  single mother, her tight  work schedule with almost no rest,  and a serious illness. At the same time she  talked a lot about her love to her family   and other things, she wanted to show that she is like many other women. Unlike distant Hollywood stars, Alla Verber liked being close to people: one day she could post her  grandchildren or  the recipe of the light-salted cucumbers, and the next day she was sitting in the front row at the Balenciaga show, participating in a fitness marathon or dancing in a stunning dress with a neckline on her own anniversary. “Luxury is generally my motto,” Verber said.  And with her self-irony this sounded perfectly fine.



“The last time I hugged you at the party after the couture show of Dolce & Gabbana, and then I went to bed and you stayed dancing all night,” the "Vogue" fashion critic Susie Menkes wrote.  Alla Verber will   remain such an energetic, uncompromisingly luxurious and loving life woman for everyone who knew  and admired her.   

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