ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on fashion retail as a general context for consumer practices in Russia. There are certain commonalities as well as distinctive features in retail development in postsocialist countries. Both Kreja and Jakovcic discuss how large-scale retail has changed the urban landscapes of East European cities. It presents an overview of scholarship on the retail trade and its transformation in postsocialist states and continues with empirical evidence of the transformation of the retail business in Russia in the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s. Several classifications of shopping malls are in use, but the major retail format in Russia is the retail-entertainment center. The chapter discusses a consumer typology, which formed in the new retail environment. The majority of the population were clients of open-air markets. Eventually the attitude to the open-air markets and other forms of retail in the 1990s changed, largely due to state and local policies and changes in the fashion retail market.
