Kristina Bardash may just be the unlikeliest face to ever helm a musical revolution. In less than a year, the 25-year-old singer, who performs under the stage name “Luna” (“moon,” in Russian), has captured the imagination of the youth of her home country, Ukraine, with both her voice and the music videos and personal style that go along with it. Unlike her glossy contemporaries, who issue blockbuster pop music, the songs off of Bardash’s debut album, Magneti, are quietly powerful: hypnotic, repetitive, with light ebbing electro beats under a popping electronic keyboard, dipping into a trancelike lullaby. Her success started organically, to hear Bardash tell it, all stemming from a Facebook post promoting the music video for her single “Ocen” (“Autumn”). “I didn’t use any PR. All I did was put it on the Internet, and then people just shared it. I didn’t put any money into it,” says the singer, who has a lanky, model-esque figure and a slightly elfin face, sitting in her Kiev apartment turned music studio. “I wanted everything to be natural in this process.” Six months later, all of her concerts in Kiev are sold out.
Bardash’s personal style is just as out of this world as her moniker: On the day we meet, she wears a short Pepto pink Roberto Cavalli button-up dress, which seems more probable on the wife of a Slavic mafioso, but somehow manages to make the thigh-skimming minidress look both casual and totally her own. “My style, naturally, is pushed more often by my mood,” says the singer, “and the same goes for my music.” And like her music, Bardash’s style is accessible to her fans, as well. Though she shops at luxury boutiques like Helen Marlen and Asthik, the singer also favors Lesnoy, the secondhand bazaar flooded by Kiev’s youth.
Bardash—her music and her style—has begun to represent a symbol of change in the shifting mainstream, and her rise could not have come at a better time for the Ukrainian music industry. The post-Soviet country is perpetually in the news, which either focuses on the conflict-stricken capital or the Russia-bordering bullet-ridden region in the east. But on the fashion front, it’s become a hub of rebirth: There’s the recent promotion of traditional dress, like the vyshyvanka, and designers like Anton Belinskiy taking the idea of war and morphing it into something both wearable and chic. Bardash borrows from the ’90s of the post–Soviet Union, a once cast-off era that’s become a red-hot trend, thanks to clothing labels like Vetements and Gosha Rubchinskiy, which celebrate the same things that her music does. Her videos are often lo-fi and grainy, reminiscent of a moving zine or a bootleg VHS tape. Her most viewed is “Ocen,” a three-minute sepia-saturated clip she filmed alone on her laptop on the playground of her self-described “ghetto” childhood neighborhood in Kiev. It was not an easy shoot. “I shot it for two hours and then it was erased because I had no more memory on my computer,” says Bardash. “Then my son started crying!”
In the video, Bardash wears a mismatched mélange of ’90s-era attire (lace-trimmed short shorts, a turtleneck, and a long camel-hued coat with scuffed-up white running sneakers) that wouldn’t look out of place on the Vetements runway. Her 4-year-old son, George, makes a cameo in an oversize peacoat and turtleneck. In other videos, Bardash’s style is just as evocative of the era. A preview to her video “Butilichka” (or “Bottle”) on Instagram shows the singer with fist-size hoops, hair heaped into a bun-bouffant, and a slip dress, a look still popular in the far-reaching provincial towns, while for “Malchik, Ti Sneg” (“Boy, You Are Snow”), Bardash wears a turtleneck and a slick tan trenchcoat that she tells me she got from a secondhand market.
Like many people behind Ukraine’s current youthquake, Bardash cites the ’90s as her main source of inspiration. “It was a revolution in the mind of our people, that now they can do what they want, that they can buy nice looks. People in the Soviet Union were very strict, and then these people opened up all of these channels and borders,” says Bardash, showing me a YouTube video of a couple on a motorcycle in Kiev in 1993, driving around the empty, clean streets of the relatively newly minted country. “It was a time for our people to be inspired. They were listening to good music, and making good music. Also, at this time my parents were so cool and stylish. They were listening to all this music while I was growing up during this time. It is always my question: ‘Why? Why is pop music now in Russia and Ukraine soulless, not like it was in the ’90s?’ I love Kiev, it is a perfect city, but some people destroy culture,” she says about the influx of commercialization, adding, “But now there is a new generation, like me, new guys who are changing the situation.”
