The Russians Claim the Fashion Spotlight Ulyana Sergeenko, one of a contingent of wealthy young Russian women who are becoming a highly visible, if not ostentatious, presence at the couture shows in Paris. OUTSIDE the Ritz Paris on the Place Vendôme, where paparazzi congregate whenever celebrities are in town for Fashion Week, a striking alabaster-skinned woman posed on her way into the hotel one morning in March. She wore navy silk pajamas with white piping, a teal topcoat draped over her shoulders, oversize cat-eye sunglasses and a loosely tied babushka over her hair, giving her the mysterious, nearly plastic, impression of a 1950s Hollywood movie star. Hours later, she emerged in a pale blue halter dress covered with spots, and posed once again. The next morning, it was a Chanel suit in black tweed and a matching beret, worn askew. Her name is Ulyana Sergeenko, and though she is not yet internationally famous, she is certainly well known among the fashion designers of this particular part of the world. She is one of their best customers, the wife of a Russian insurance billionaire, a former model, a star of street-style photographers and a burgeoning designer and photographer herself. Among a pack of fabulous-looking young women from Russia who have arrived on the fashion scene with the flourish of Rudolf Nureyev, Ms. Sergeenko, who is 32, has made what is perhaps the greatest leap onto the stage. On Tuesday, little more than a year after she started her fashion label in Moscow, she will have a show in Paris, crashing the haute couture party, no less. She is showing right after Chanel. "I am a little worried," Ms. Sergeenko said by phone from her atelier in Moscow last week, "but I think this is the right time, because our clients want us to be in Paris." Ms. Sergeenko, who was recently named by the Russian edition of Glamour as that country's trendsetter of the year, is nervous about how she will be received in Paris. That is because she was not actually invited by the French to participate in their official couture event, and showing independently is a bit presumptuous. But judging by the increasing presence of Russian models, journalists, stylists and, most important, clients, her unsanctioned show will hardly go unnoticed or unattended. Requests for tickets have already exceeded capacity, and Natalia Vodianova, the Russian supermodel, is expected to appear on her runway. In fact, it would be difficult to overstate the impact that Ms. Sergeenko and this clique of young Russian women, becoming known for their "unbounded personal style," as Vogue noted in its April issue, is having on fashion. They include Miroslava Duma, the daughter of a Russian senator, who edits a fashion and style Web site; Vika Gazinskaya, a fashion designer with an eclectic range of geometric hairstyles; and Elena Perminova, a model who is the girlfriend of Alexander Lebedev, a former spy for the K.G.B. and now a billionaire banking magnate and owner of The Independent and The Evening Standard of London newspapers. According to a Style.com assessment of the Russian Fashion Pack, as they are sometimes called, no one on the show circuit, with the exception of Anna Dello Russo, "changes outfits more often or with more look-at-me enthusiasm than this group of designers, bloggers and scenemakers." With their audacious entrances and conspicuous consumption, they are the most visible new customers for couture in a generation, far outspending clients from emerging economies like India, Brazil and China. Karl Lagerfeld has said that, in a given season, some Russian clients have bought as many as 35 Chanel couture outfits, which typically have prices in the five and six figures. Ms. Sergeenko said her purchases were far more conservative, though three of her couture dresses by John Galliano were included in a recent exhibition devoted to Dior at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow. "We were a closed country for a long time, so for a while, it was like a kid going into a candy shop," said Anya Ziourova, the fashion director of Tatler Russia, who is also revered on blogs for her style of mixing, for example, a Gap top with Balenciaga pants. We wanted all of it at once. It is only now, in the last five years, that taste has been evolving into something more sophisticated, something that might attract people beyond Russia.