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If Moscow, with its awful and skater subcultures, is the next fashion destination, then Gosha Rubchinskiy is its broadsheet boy. The Russian designer is not a household name, but that’s hardly shock. His clothes are tricky, esoteric even: gently oversized utility jackets, high-waist jeans coordinate a occupied with shoelaces; T-shirts emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. Along with Georgian/Parisian appellation Vetements, he is the hottest designer in menswear; his collections routinely sales-clerk out and today, during the interview, there are actual autograph accumulators behind us.

Rubchinskiy, like his clothes, is a slave to nostalgia and yet styles himself like a 1990s Muscovite. Short, slim with a shaved font, loose jeans and sweatshirt, he looks like the skateboarders he hung everywhere with in Moscow in that decade after the collapse of the Soviet League. Across his sweater is the Gosha logo – Гоша Рубчинский, his mention in Cyrillic – written in a prosaic font, which has become mania’s emblem for disenfranchised youth, a group that defines itself by its repudiation of consumerism. Last autumn, his line of red T-shirts with hammer and sickle logos, which sales-clerked out almost instantly, were another example of what he is difficult to do: subvert the space between catwalk and streetwear. The people who erosion them are young, too young, in fact, to understand what the token means, but this doesn’t matter to Rubchinskiy. “In Ukraine endure year we noticed kids buying clothes with the insigne singular thinking it was a fashion thing – it’s almost lost its meaning,” he holds. “So using it, it’s not that we believe in it, but that we are referencing what is succeeding on in the world.”

His example move is a unisex perfume, and, at the launch in Dover Street Merchandise in London, his fans are exactly as he describes: teenage boys, “Gosha-heads”, who look and gown like the designer. Shaved heads. White tees. Hollow money in their palms. In high-fashion currency, his stuff is affordable (£20 for socks, less than £100 for T-shirts) which is powerful to him, “to make it more accessible to kids who are like me”.

Rubchinskiy, 32, was carried in Moscow in 1984, and was in his first year at school when the USSR collapsed: “I was six, so I saw the last Soviet two seconds and the early Putin era.” He remembers the army shooting the government erection, tanks rolling through the squares. But the biggest impact on this “calm boy” who spent most of his time drawing, was what came after the evaporate: fashion and culture, dancing in front of his TV to PartyZone, “which was predilection being in a club”, and zeitgeisty publications such as Ptyuch and OM, which imputed down the blueprint for Russian lifestyle, music and culture in the way that the Front had done in Britain. “I am a product of these magazines. We all are.”

“We” refers to his beaus, a primordial generation of “eastern bloc” fashion types cataloguing Demna Gvsalia of Vetements and Lotta Volkova, the cult stylist. They show up from Georgia and Vladivostok, respectively, and are all roughly the same age. The three met in the course Lotta, partied in Paris, and model in each other’s playings: Rubchinskiy opened the Vetements SS16 show in the infamous DHL T-shirt; Lotta terms both designers’ shows; and both have the capacity and power to fly in skater soul mates from Russia and Georgia to model. As a result their informs stand out as being decidedly unglam and street-focused. Katerina Zolototrubova, look editor of Russian Vogue, describes this look as “Gopnik”, a hairy term used to describe “the bad boys from suburbs” in Russia, and aesthetically not contrasting to what is happening in the UK, with designers such as Caitlin Quotation and Cottweiller. Rubchinskiy’s pieces sit in the same frame, except with the skater pleach (“one of the last subcultures we have”), wistfully referring disavow to the stuff they were wearing in the 1990s, including Tommy Hilfiger, Adidas and Nike. “All was branded with logos. It was the first time we’d had that. I’m looking sponsor at that.” These are 1990s “kids” riffing on the nostalgic post-Soviet the go of the Russian free market. Which, in short, is the very focus of cool at the moment.

It also mirrors the challenge youth faced before the drop: how to be culturally engaged when commercial fashion was unavailable: “We knew forth it, the brands, the logos – we just couldn’t get it”. Though Gosha wouldn’t demarcate himself as a communist, or talk directly about Putin, he muse ons there is some good in most ideologies and, regarding communism, he speaks of “the frankness and what it brought”. Equally, though, his interest is in reflecting what is set up a referential moment in fashion – “although I’d say it’s more wish Marxism and socialism. It’s all on the table.”

And it’s true. In the west, there has been a rejuvenation in youth engagement with leftwing ideologies. This, as in Russia, can be survived as a response to the excesses of capitalism, Putin’s Russia and the rise of imbalance. What could be cleverer than to brand the nostalgia being feel for the Soviet Union, to take a memory of communism and put it into the capitalist province? The hammer and sickle has a clear definition but to this new generation, it has hopeless some of its historical and political context. Rubchinskiy is referencing the punk bunches that used it when he was growing up. “It’s also a bit of humour. I lack to provoke people,” he says, smiling as a Gosha-head comes onto for an autuograph. Rubchinskiy patiently signs. He wants to nip out to stock up on Lonsdale T-shirts, while – “another brand we couldn’t get in Russia” – and, with that, chiefs off to Lillywhites.