The 16-year-old Russian 'princess' making a big splash in the fashion world

Sixteen-year-old Russian heiress Kira Plastinina is billed as the world's youngest fashion designer whose designs have taken Russia by storm. Now she’s bent on world domination, starting with America. But is there anything more to her than her Daddy’s stash of roubles?

"Sitting on a red velvet sofa, picking at a plate of strawberries, in her plush New York hotel suite, Russian heiress Kira Plastinina could be mistaken for just another teen socialite ready to splash her cash," says The Mail on Sunday. But Plastinina, 16, is no ordinary "spoilt bratski". Billed as the world's youngest fashion designer, her eponymous fashion chain has taken just a year to storm Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. Now she's bent on world domination, starting with America. But is there anything more to her than her Daddy's stash of roubles?

It's easy to be cynical, says New York magazine, especially as Plastinina confesses her main ambition before she became a designer was to be "a princess". She still loves puppies, ponies and pink, and her idea of a great date is a sleepover. The suspicion, surely, is that she is simply the puppet of her father's ambition. Sergei Plastinina, himself just 40, is Russia's orange juice king and has a talent for branding. His insight that concentrated orange juice would taste better to ordinary Russians if imbued with a whiff of Anglo old money led him to call his firm Wimm-Ball-Denn (think Wimbledon). "Never mind that it said made in Russia' on the package; it just didn't say it in Cyrillic." After building his firm into a $5.6bn giant, he decided to diversify. He knew the teen retail market was huge. What better figurehead than his pretty, fashionable daughter who liked sketching dresses? At 14, Kira Plastinina "officially became a brand".

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