Ghost of a flea

As a scholar who has devoted her career to studying fashion, Olga Vainshtein always had a natural curiousity about dandies. But her interest took off after she unwittingly married one. During a recent interview in a Moscow cafe, Vainshtein described her style-conscious husband, Shakespeare scholar Aidyn Dzhebrailov.

"After we were married, I observed how carefully he would get dressed in the morning," she said. "We'd go shopping for clothes together. I'd see something I thought was fine, but Aidyn would say, 'That's for the collective farm. That's garbage.' And this is how I began to discover the world of a male taste that is very different from female taste."