Eight months after Rubchinskiy announced the end of his label, allegations surfaced against the designer. Text messages leaked between Rubchinskiy and a 16-year-old model, Jan Silfverling, wherein Rubchinskiy was requesting inappropriate photographs. Rubchinskiy has denied the allegations made against him. A statement provided to Hypebeast by the designer’s team stated, “This was a street casting for a lookbook shoot. The person sent a direct mail to us asking to be considered for the casting. This happens all the time…Gosha did a face time with him, and then he asked for a photo to have on file with all the others. The person said he wasn’t alone and couldn’t take a photo, so Gosha suggested he just quickly goes to the bathroom and take a quick photo on the mirror, so he could show the rest of the team and have it on file. This exchange as depicted on the Instagram post of Supreme leaks news has been altered and taken out of context. It is clear there has been modifications and deletions to make it look bad where in fact it was a simple request for a photo to facilitate the street casting. The person started contacting us very often demanding an answer about the casting and became a bit weird. So Gosha blocked him, and we think this is why the person is trying to make Gosha look bad, and turn what was a totally innocent street casting look something that it was not. We have been doing such direct street casting for ten years, and we have never had such a problem, therefore this is invalid.”
Joffe also made a statement following the accusations in 2019 telling WWD, “We continue to support Gosha due to the complete lack of any evidence that he abused his power or did anything illegal. There is hardly any more real street casting these days. Many, many people use social media for casting now. We believe that one should be innocent until proven guilty, and that proper fact-checking should be the standard procedure.The lack of it is really dangerous and as abhorrent as the abuse of power itself.”
Despite the accusations never being proven, Rubchinskiy’s public reputation hasn’t been able to fully bounce back.
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