Esquire Weekend: How It Was
On May 26, Esquire magazine held its second interactive festival in 360-degree format. This year, the Esquire Weekend took place in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) on Gogol Boulevard.
The festival brought together all the city’s main trends in one venue. The magazine’s most popular columns – including Music, Dialogues, Rules of Life, Reading, Masterpiece, Woman We Love, Wardrobe, and Hunger – “came to life” in interactive format.
This year’s Esquire Weekend was a veritable music festival. Guests enjoyed performances by such top Russian acts as Therr Maitz, Dolphin, Husky, and Anton Sevidov, new groups My and D.O.C., and such popular Moscow DJs as Mark Schedrin, Chagin, and Pirumov. Megafon sponsored the music portion of the program.
Esquire magazine Editor-in-Chief Sergei Minaev held public dialogues with individuals who shape the development of the main facets of society: politics, culture, and technology. Festival guests could also pose questions to 2018 Russian presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak, producer Maxim Fadeev, BBC Digital Editor Dmitry Shishkin, film producers Ilya Stuart and Mikhail Vrubel, and director Jora Kryzhovnikov. French brand Lacoste provided support for the dialogues.
In the glass chapel that served for a time as the Pantheon of the Rules of Life, a choir performed direct quotes of great directors, artists and rebels in rock opera style, and young actors recited the rules of life according to ordinary people that creative producer and director Savva Saveliev collected in the Logic Lounge during the festival itself. Director Talgat Batalov also presented a multimedia performance called “The Rules of Life – Live.”
Guests could also speak tête-à-tête with the leading characters of the column The Woman We Love – TV hosts Elena Letuchaya and actress Maria Shumakova – who were stationed in the Volkswagen Touareg Third Generation salon. In the Esquire x Republic library and reception room, guests could hear how famous actors, writers, musicians, and journalists read excerpts from their favorite literary works to the accompaniment of original electronic music by Dmitry Ustinov and Yaroslav Vyalykh. Participants in the literary and musical experiment included Sergey Mezentsev, Pavel Artemyev, Guzel Yakhina, Galina Yuzefovich, Alisa Kretova, Kirill Rikhter, Sergey Yakovlev and others. A recording of the podcast will appear on the esquire.ru site soon.
Guests relaxed in the Logic Lounge designed by renowned street artist Misha Most, and in the Jardin & Greenfield zone where they enjoyed hot coffee and tea in capsule form. The MMOMA “Dance” and “Petrushestviye” (“A Petrushevskaya Journey”) exhibits were the main zones in the Masterpiece area, and the Wardrobe zone featured modern art objects in the form of a Lacoste polo shirt, the new classical watch DS PH200M by Swiss watchmaker Certina, and sneakers by the premium Italian brand Premiata.
The Hunger zone brought together Moscow’s most outstanding gastronomic projects: the Culinary On studio, the Zhadina-Govyadina gastropub, the Cheese Connection restaurant, Chicha, Molon Lave, 15/17 Bar & Grill, Privyet, Crevette! and Little White, and the Surf Coffee café.
The Right Guys rental company provided the LED screens, furniture, and interior décor for the event. The Petroglyph company installed refrigerators packed with natural mineral water on the premises of the Esquire Weekend, and the 2WIFI company provided free Wi-Fi for all the guests.
