Fake News Found its Way Into Fashion, Its Targets Were a Handful of Russian Industry Insiders

This past Fashion Month in February, an email with the subject line, “Mira Duma: facts on money laundering,” began to make the rounds. Originating from the email address [email protected] and initially sent to 20 editors and influencers, it was not long before the email was swiftly forwarded amongst the fashion pack. The timing was striking: Just two weeks prior, 33-year old Russian-born fashion/tech entrepreneur Miroslava Duma had come under fire for posting an image on Instagram of a card that depicted lyrics in a Kanye West song, including the N-word.

The email, whose author declared to have “found unexpected facts about a real background of Miroslava Duma,” contained an attachment to a 24-page PDF. The first page of that PDF, entitled, “MIRA DUMA REPORT: A Rasist [sic], a Homophobe and a Lurking Landromat,” featured an image of Ms. Duma and Ivanka Trump.

The pages that followed were a typo-ridden report compiled by the “Kiev Fashion Resistance,” purporting to “unfold illegal activities of Russian citizens, Alexander Mikheev [Duma’s father-in-law] and his family members – Alexey Mikheev and his wife, Miroslava Duma – in the United States of America and Europe.”

In particular, the report claimed, “Our investigation shows that Alexander Mikheev, Alexey Mikheev and Miroslava Duma violated Russian and US anti-corruption laws,” and continued on to allege, “It is doubtless that Alexander Mikheev, Alexey Mikheev and Miroslava Duma violated many US laws and acts, preventing money-laundering practices in US, in addition to a number of Russian laws.”

The email, itself, called on its recipients to “help us to share this information.” The PDF, which Refinery29’s Connie Wang and journalist Valerie Stivers very-aptly say read like “an introduction to a spy novel,” contained screenshots of “public tax declarations,” reports from the “Federal Tax Service of Russia,” and seemingly straightforward background facts on Duma and her husband. What may have appeared at a quick first glance to be a legitimate (albeit poorly translated) dossier was actually fake news, a widely mis-used term that refers to the publication of completely false information for the purpose of political or financial gain

It was a “fake news campaign to smear Russia’s biggest fashion influencers … packaged to appear superficially credible, and circulated electronically in an apparent effort at character assassination,” according to Wang and Stivers.

But the efforts did not stop with Miroslava Duma.

One month later, Wang and Stivers discovered that “another fake news report put together by ‘Kiev Fashion Resistance’ started circulating, this time about model Natalia Vodianova. On April 10, yet another was sent about businesswoman and art collector Dasha Zhukova. Both reports similarly claimed that these Russian women’s Western-facing entrepreneurial activities relied on illegal activities, and insisted that this information should be ‘newsworthy’ to their intended audiences.”

Refinery29 states that its team “attempted to fact check the numerous claims within the reports, but was “unable to verify any of the claims.” The article does note, though, that “while much of the reports are based on publicly available information like [Duma’s] tax declarations, personal investments, and online databases, the conclusions drawn require huge leaps in logic.”

What is also clear from the reports is that they were crafted by “someone [who] is clearly exploiting the faults in the clickbait economy,” investigative reporter Alexey Kovalev told R29. “This was clearly designed to grab the attention of people who will not dig into the details. They’ll just grab the clickbait headline they’re fed.”

The reports are also glaring reminders of the scope of fake news. Fashion is, it turns out, not immune to “propaganda for insidious ends” that is most typically associated with politics, according to Wang and Stivers.

“In our eagerness to find and condemn the Big Bads — the culturally insensitive, the willfully ignorant, the famous and wealthy and corrupt — we are sometimes blinded to the deeper manipulation: that our information-systems themselves are making us less likely to distinguish the truth from lies, the complicated nuances from the convenient conspiracies.”

The manipulation of information-systems themselves is “a less fashionable problem,” Wang and Stivers state, “but [it’s] one that’s far more dangerous for this industry and beyond.”

* Be sure to read Refinery29’s full article here.