student, she participated in the world contest of young designers in Tokyo and won. Her fashion collection was called “Queen of the Homeless”. Tokyo’s teenage girls bought all the queen’s clothes after the very first day of the contest. The girl-fire was not left alone in the streets of Tokyo, as if it was not her walking along, but Vivien Westwood. Stenko dropped out of the Institute, dove into the troubled waters of fashion design and surfaced in central London, in the old buildings of Central Saint Martins (the world’s most famous design school), to become a student of the fashion guru Louise Wilson. During her five years in London she learned and perfected her English and won eight fashion show competitions in Tokyo (again), Paris, Rome, Buenos Aires and Beijing. Vogue magazine called her one of the world’s twenty best fashion designers of the next generation. Toma Stenko made stage costumes for the English National Ballet, gave birth to Irakli Kvirikadze, Jr. (my son), was nicknamed ‘The Russian Coco Ch’. (I decided not to mention who Coco Ch. is in order not to overpraise Toma Stenko, although it is certainly clear who Coco Ch. is) by the toughest guru of European fashion Louise Wilson (among her students were Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Stella McCartney). “You are as crazy, exuberant and lonely as Coco was”, Louise Wilson used to tell her. I remember the tears — a very rare thing! — in Toma Stenko’s eyes when she told me how Wilson summoned her to her office a day before the Central Saint Martins’ fashion contest finals, took the bronze
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