/fa/ - Fashion

>>15684404
>cheap and unreliable materials
No, that was entirely caused by the centralized economy of the USSR and its satellite state facing shortages and cutting certain field that no longer had the priority.
I'm sure there are some russian fashion brands making crap pieces with cheapo chinese parts but the legit ones (Raketa, Vostok and the other brands using their movements like Sturmanskie) are fine.
>fakes and frankens
Not really? Most russian brands today have a hard time staying in business without seeking a buyer to become part of a group (see : Luch), there's not much money to be made in faking watches people aren't buying in the first place.
However there are a lot, and I mean A LOT of people re-using parts from stocks that were abandoned in the late 90s and early 2000s to make fakes advertised as new models or NOS classic models.
If you want an idea, go check russian-watches.info and look at their collections that are not clearly branded or have contradictory markings. The guys running this webside along with a few others in different languages (there is one in german that I saw but I don't remember its exact name) have some stocks of made-up new models to sell.
Pic very much related.

>>15679974
Do not, I repeat, DO NOT get it from russian-watches.info.
They pay to get on top of google listings when searching russian watches, they even get first page results when searching current Raketa models they do not even stock. They sell fakes, some obvious (big 24h watches that were never part of Raketa's catalog, ever, including ome that are using dial designs from Vostok or Poljot), some not so much ("commemorative" Big Zero variants that look enough like official pieces to seem believable, especially since Raketa made commemorative watches for dignitaries and military personnel) as well as frankens and redials labeled as NOS.
A couple years back, they stocked some really obvious fake Raketas with WW2 era german planes on the dials and were immediatly busted by the then freshly revived Raketa brand that blacklisted the website on the spot.
so you are most likely to get a fake of sort. And that is, if you get anything at all as a bunch of people have come forward describing how they received completely different watches from what they ordered, or even got a notice that their products had been "destroyed or lost during shipping" just a week after the order was placed, before any shipping number could be provided, which is beyond suspicious.
Keep an eye out on Ebay and maybe Etsy, a bunch of legit russian watches sometimes show up from Ukraine, Belarus or Kazakhstan, far from the official stocks that Raketa stopped managing properly in the 90s as they were going under, and these distant stocks can be in pretty good condition. Just do some research into movement ID (all movements built in the USSR had to have a specific identification number engraved on the bridge, if a seller won't open the caseback to show it, that's a bad sign), dial characteristics, cases and you'll find one eventually. Find catalog photos.
Sadly, the Copernic isn't as well documented as the Big Zero that has a few guides and discussions online tracking what fakes exist on the market.

>>15466689
That's a shame, I really like some of their obviously fake 24h designs.

>>15444075
>>15444020
"anything goes" era Raketa 24h watches are really, really dumb.
I want one.

I can't stop looking at these really dumb 24h watches and I'm that close to pulling the trigger, send help.