Ideology and Clothes: The Rise and Decline of Socialist Official Fashion

This thesis focuses on the relationship between the socialist system and fashion in four countries: Croatia, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Soviet Union during seventy-two years of communist rule. From its beginning in 1917, the socialist system had an antagonistic relationship with fashion, which eventually turned into a grudging acceptance by the end of the 1980s. I identify two main types of sartorial official codes within socialism: utopian dress and socialist official fashion. I analyse these ideological constructs through the concepts of time, class, taste and gender. The symbolic production of utopian dress was informed by the initial Bolshevik rejection of the past and the search for a totally new type of clothes. Socialist official fashion reflected the regimes' ontological fear of change and discontinuity, and in the later phases of socialism their need to dress up their new middle classes in civilian clothes. The socialist regimes failed to invent a new socialist dress. Instead, they embraced the most traditional aesthetics in dress and the most conventional notion of gender. I demonstrate that similarities and differences in socialist official fashion were informed by ideological shifts within the master narratives in the respective countries. I conclude that the problematic relationship between socialism and fashion was caused by their ontological differences

Socialist Dandies International: East Europe, 1946-1959

This article maps the looks and lifestyle choices of small groups of young, like-minded people who emerged in the postwar Soviet Union and East Europe in the background of huge political, social, and cultural changes. With their androgynous bodies wrapped in drape jackets and narrow trousers, and their love of jazz and swing, these young men stood in a sharp contrast to the official ideology that promoted socialism as a new, pure, and highly rationalized project, its ideal robust and strong man, and its mass culture that insisted on educational and restrained forms of entertainment. Through the categories of dress, body, and big city, the article investigates the clashes, and the eventual truce, between the socialist streamlined and rationalized master narrative and the young dandies' fragmented and disordered narrative. The article argues that the socialist dandies were not politically minded, and that their challenge to the officially proclaimed values was informed by their adolescent recklessness and a general postwar desolation. They were declared state enemies because the socialist regimes did not allow for alternative types of modernity. Consequently, the authorities condemned the young dandies' looks and interests as cosmopolitan, because they originated in the West, and as artificial, since they belonged to the culture that had preceded a new socialist world

Overalls: Functional, Political, Fashionable

The essay investigates the material uses and symbolic meanings of overalls through the differing notions of functional and political, masculine and feminine, and subversive and fashionable. Moreover, the comparative analysis covers its topic both historically and geographically. In their flatness and overall economy of style, overalls are an extremely simple garment, but precisely due to such characteristics they were equally appropriated by the Russian Constructivists in the 1920s and the Italian Futurist Thayaht in 1919. Historically, women started to wear overalls on the factory floor during World War One. On woman, this sexually neutral garment symbolized a technological progress, and even became a fashionable item. Functional and technologically advanced, the space suit is the ultimate overalls. In the 1960s, it was white and silver. Courrèges cleverly translated the 1960s space-craze into a range of stamped mirror-disc overalls. In fact, from the 1920s, categories such as functionality, simplicity and comfort increasingly migrated from the austere world of Utopia into the field of fashion. As a modernist phenomenon itself, but unburdened by any messianic programs or manifestos, fashion both readjusted and transferred utopian ideas into the everyday. Its commercial nature enabled fashion and its practitioners not only to envisage new outfits in geometric shapes, but also to efficiently produce them, and sell them either as elitist clothes or mass sportswear

Introduction to dress and fashion in East Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus

The regions of East Europe, Russia, and the Caucasus are known for their richly embroidered ethnic clothing. The varied styles of ethnic dress and the associated social practices throughout these regions were strongly influenced by both ancient traditions and highly diverse climatic and geographic conditions, ranging from subtropical to Arctic and from high mountains and rolling plains to northern oceans and southern seas. But the rich history of dress in this vast area is not confined to ethnic dress. The past and present of dress in these regions have been complicated by the wide variety of political circumstances, cultures, and religions in which dress was, and is, embedded. Restricted to a small area and a tight-knit community, ethnic dress differed from national dress in that the latter resided symbolically in vast imagined spaces and served to engage the masses in the period of national awakening from the middle of the nineteenth century on

Let Them Wear Beige: The Petit-Bourgeois World of Official Socialist Dress

Socialist regimes always had a stormy and hostile relationship with fashion. The early Bolsheviks rejected even the word “fashion”, and insisted on functional and undecorated clothing, and the post-war East European socialist regimes initially embraced that ideology and officially rejected western fashion. A new ideological turn took place after Khrushchev affirmed his rule in 1956, and attacked excessive Stalinist aesthetics. Official attitudes towards western fashion mellowed in both Russia and East European socialist countries. But with neither tradition nor market, and aspiring to control fashion changes inside their centralized fashion systems, the socialist regimes could neither keep up with nor embrace western fashion trends. In this paper I offer an interpretation of that encounter between socialism and western fashion, which occurred between 1958 and 1968. It resulted in the sartorial phenomenon that I call “official socialist dress” which was connected to the creation of a new socialist middle class by the socialist regimes. In practice, however, official socialist dress had little to do with everyday reality. Queues, shortages and poor quality supply in the shops continued, confirming in differing degrees the socialist regimes' domination of both the time and the consumption of their citizens. Official socialist dress was an ideological construct, a discourse channeled through the state-owned media. The aesthetics of official socialist dress was informed by simple and moderate lines. I call that conventional style “socialist good taste”. By advocating modesty, and suggesting creativity within standardization, socialist good taste served the new stylistic synthesis of proletarian asceticism and petit bourgeois prettiness. While official socialist dress and socialist good taste eased the introduction of western fashion into the socialist systems, they were at the same time fatal factors that arrested the development of a genuine socialist fashion in the decades to follow. All the distortions that characterized socialist fashion were already transparent in the conservative aesthetics of official socialist dress from the end of the 1950s: an ontological anxiety about the fluidity of time, a pathological fear of change, the hierarchical levels of decision making in planned economies, the negligence of the market, the confused relationship towards western fashion, cultural autarky, and a lack of experience informed by an earlier ideological rejection of fashion's history. As the first comparative and historical analysis of socialist dress codes, the paper is based on in-depth field research of a variety of documentary sources including women’s magazines, art journals, picture weeklies, political dailies and satirical magazines. The analysis crosses the boundaries between different disciplines, drawing on ideas from fashion studies, cultural anthropology, critical theory, gender studies, political science and studies on the everyday in socialism. Embedded in this broad theoretical foundation, the paper analyses the concepts of time, class, taste and gender in socialism in relation to dress. The investigation of the ideologised uses of these catagories facilitates a comparison of Western fashions with their socialist counterparts. By analysing dress practices which were informed by different ideological and organisational principles, the paper broadens the field of fashion studies that had previously been exclusively organised around Western fashion and its practices

‘Myth and Reality: Socialist Fashion and Five-Year Plans’

In this essay Bartlett claims that in its official version fashion was embedded in the socialist mythical reality, both as a part of the centralized economies and their five-year plans, and as an image of conventional yet unachievable elegance, obeying in this sense the aesthetics of socialist realism. Bartlett argues that such bureaucratic over-centralization was not only in line with the prevailing economic model, but also demonstrated the socialist fear of change and discontinuity of time. Preferring the synchronic, systematic level over the diachronic, processive level, the Soviet authorities attempted to control and tame fashion trends through centralized systems of clothes production and distribution. In contrast to socialist official fashion, Bartlett situates everyday fashion in a fluid space in which the official, the informal and the illegal were equally present. It could be obtained at state ateliers, acquired through the prohibited services of a seamstress, or sewn by oneself. In contrast to the concept of timelessness, which defined socialist official fashion, everyday fashion acknowledged change and was served by a faster flow of time

Austere, pretty, sexy: the concept of gender in socialist and post-socialist fashion media

Workshop conducted at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest upon invitation

1920s fashionista in the Soviet Union

Dr. Djurdja Barlett explores the very eclectic fashion choices available for Russian women in the 1920s. During this era, citizens of the young Soviet Union were surrounded by a wide spectrum of different ideas and trends - cubism, jazz, Bauhaus and cinema, each of these represented a different image of women. Soviet women had to make choices, as even in fashion they were restricted by ideology, often creating their own styles. The brief period of NEP allowed Russian women to adopt the style of a teenage girl – á la garçonne in Europe or flapper in the USA. Parallel to this, constructivist artists were also designing clothing, but with the aim to make functional not fashionable items