Onetime Street Style Star Mentioned in the Mueller Report
As Americans today skim through the 448-page Mueller report, much of which was redacted, the fashion community will be buzzing about the inclusion of a former one of its own in the dossier. Spotted by Bloomberg reporter Kim Bhasin and circulated by The Fashion Law’s Julie Zerbo and Refinery29’s Connie Wang was the mention of Miroslava Duma, the founder of Buro 24/7, founder and CEO of Future Tech Lab, and a onetime street style star.
Duma is named as “a contact of Ivanka Trump’s from the fashion industry” who “first passed along invitations for Ivanka Trump and candidate Trump” to the 2016 St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. The invites are said to have been relayed through Duma in late December 2015. Neither Trump attended the event, though the candidate appears to have sent a formal note declining the invite to Russia’s deputy prime minister.
Duma has been on something of a fashion-world hiatus since she and her friend Ulyana Sergeenko were found to have exchanged notes with racist language in January 2018. It was then also revealed that Duma had made transphobic comments at a conference in 2012. But before she was ousted from the fashion community, she was one of its brightest stars. Street style photographers loved her for her adventurous style, and she was a front row fixture at the shows in New York, London, Milan, and Paris.
According to Wang’s reporting, done in collaboration with Valerie Stivers, Duma was also the target of a so-called “Black PR” smear campaign in 2018 when an unidentified source began circulating damaging reports to members of the fashion press and influencers. Some chalked it up to trouble in the homeland; “These women are also vulnerable to a particular kind of homegrown criticism of being ‘too Western’ or ‘not Russian enough,’ ” the reporters explained in their piece.
