Fashion under Socialism
Author: Djurdja Bartlett

The relationship between dress and Socialism started in Soviet Russia following the 1917 Communist Revolution. When Soviet-style Socialism was introduced in East Europe in 1948, dress became an important ideological and practical issue in the countries under Soviet political control. However, the styles of garments, and the discourses in which they were embedded, were not homogeneous in the Soviet Union and the East European countries during the seventy-two years of Communist rule. Both similarities and differences between them were informed by each country’s political, economic, and social organization. Differences in dress and dress-related practices were informed by a more or less dogmatic implementation of Communist ideology. Differences also related to Soviet Russia’s turn to Socialism in 1917, after which it went through a series of very different Socialist practices, from Leninism through the New Economic Policy (NEP) and its reintroduction of semicapitalism, to Stalinism, even before World War II. During that historical period, dress bowed to different aesthetics, from utopian abstractionism to Socialist realism.

East European countries became Socialist only in 1948, when Soviet-style Socialism was imposed on them. These countries had enjoyed fashion and its rituals during the interwar period, in contrast to the disappearance of fashion as an everyday practice in the Soviet Union. However, after 1948, they were forced to reject their own fashion traditions and to officially accept the centralized Soviet model of production and distribution of clothes. In that way, the periodization of Communist dress codes from the 1950s on followed similar patterns in the Soviet Union and the East European countries under its political influence. Still, dress practices were diverse. Contrary to the prevailing image of Socialist dress as uniform and gray, different styles of clothing coexisted in Socialist societies, even though all Communist regimes initially rejected the notion of fashion as decadent and bourgeois.

Bolshevik Opposition to Fashion

Socialism was established in Russia following the 1917 revolution, when the Bolsheviks, a radical political group led by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, overthrew the tsarist regime. Socialist ideas about equality between people, and between men and women, had already appeared in utopian literature and political thought from the sixteenth century on. Thomas More, and those who followed him, advocated that rational and happy societies should have few, if any, distinctions in dress. In his 1516 book Utopia, More had suggested that sexes should be distinguished, and the married from the unmarried, but otherwise everyone should wear the same thing and have only one outfit, which, he said, should not be unpleasing to the eye. From More’s Utopia and Tomasso Campanella’s The City of the Sun on, utopian literature preferred practicality, simplicity, and comfort in dress. The idea that fashion is the enemy of true equality was stressed anew in the political, literary, and theoretical writings of nineteenth-century Socialist and liberal thinkers, such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri Saint-Simon.

Inspired by the earlier Western utopian theories and practices, prerevolutionary Russian utopian ideas already prefigured Socialist anxieties concerning dress as a carrier of status and gender differences, as well as a messenger of change. Alexander Bogdanov’s utopian vision of dress in his 1909 novel Red Star was rooted in an earlier rejection of dress as a visible sign of gender, social, and class differences. On Bogdanov’s red planet Mars, which was three hundred years ahead of the Earth, clothes were designed according to the most progressive scientific knowledge, and their production was centrally informed, without any waste of fabric or production time. Clothes were manufactured in a huge variety of predetermined patterns, each of which was nevertheless simple and without any special embellishments. The cut of clothes was loose, as the Martians avoided emphasizing sexual differences.

The Bolsheviks turned all these utopian ideas about clothes into official ideology. Simultaneously, they tried to abolish Western-style retailing and Western-style dress in practice, perceiving them as a prime example of capitalist industry and Western bourgeois influence. Fashion became a despised activity after 1917, especially since it originated in the West and was part of the rejected bourgeois cultural and commercial heritage. The sartorial eclecticism that nevertheless prevailed in everyday life was heavily attacked as part of petit-bourgeois culture, first by the futurists and later by the constructivists. The constructivist artists Varvara Stepanova, Liubov Popova, Aleksandr Rodchenko, and Vladimir Tatlin all proposed simple, hygienic, and functional clothes. In 1923, Stepanova’s programmatic article, “Today’s Clothing: Prozodezhda,” with its insistence on functionality, anonymity, simplicity, efficiency, and a precise social role for clothes, was the most radical proposal. Instead of fashion, Stepanova advocated production clothing in which one could work and called it prozodezhda. Her production clothing was never mass-produced, but Stepanova’s few remaining drawings of geometric, simply cut clothes provide a glimpse of her concept of prozodezhda. In practice, only Popova and Stepanova entered into real production when, in 1923, they became textile designers in the First State Textile Print Factory in Moscow. They abolished the traditional flower motifs, but their minimalist geometric patterns were too radical for the traditionally oriented mass consumers. In the end, constructivism was a highly utopian project, which failed in its attempts at seeking a total change in humankind, everyday life, and its objects. The constructivist dream of mass production of new clothes for new people never materialized due to scarcity of fabric and backward textile and clothing industries, which were additionally damaged by the civil war.

Sartorial Plurality in the 1920s

Nadezhda Lamanova. After seizing power, the Bolsheviks nationalized both textile factories and retail establishments and centralized their activities. The most prominent prerevolutionary Russian fashion designer, Nadezhda Lamanova, who had catered to both the aristocracy and the artistic elite, embraced the political and social changes brought by the revolution. She lost her well-established high-class fashion salon in Moscow but subsequently was either in charge of or actively involved in the various state-initiated institutions dealing with the new Socialist dress; she worked simultaneously as a costume designer for theater and film. In contrast to the constructivists, who promoted total change in dress with their novel geometric cuts for clothes and geometric motifs in textiles, Lamanova tried to preserve beautiful dress and decorative motifs in clothes. She had to renounce the phenomenon of fashion but proposed simple dresses with elongated lines, resembling those of 1920s Western fashions, and embellished them with reinterpreted ethnic motifs. Together with ethnic-dress expert Evgeniia Pribyl’skaia, Lamanova simplified traditional ethnic motifs, making them similar to Western art deco embellishments. Lamanova’s activities were approved by Anatolii Lunacharskii, the People’s Commissar of the Ministry of Enlightenment, and were embedded in the Subsection of Art and Production within the Fine Art Department of his ministry.

The Bolsheviks started with a utopian idea of a completely new dress and an attempt to abolish fashion, but already by the mid-1920s, they realized that they needed beautiful clothes to represent their regime at home within the context of the advancing NEP culture, as well as abroad at various international events and fairs. Lamanova was put in charge of the artistic laboratory that supplied prototypes for the Kustexport, the artisans’ association founded in 1920 in collaboration with the Ministry for Foreign Trade to export folk art. She and her collaborators (Vera Mukhina, Alexandra Exter, Evgeniia Pribyl’skaia, and Nadezhda Makarova) used Russian ethnic motifs on current Western-style women’s dresses for the Soviet presentation at the International Exhibition of Applied Arts in Paris in 1925. Lamanova won the Grand Prix at the Exhibition for contemporary dresses based on folk art.

Westernized NEP Fashion. At home, the Bolsheviks faced a huge economic crisis following the civil war. When they finally won over their external and internal enemies in 1921, they had no resources left to implement their avant-garde social and cultural programs. In 1921, with the approval of Lenin, the NEP was established. By recognizing private ownership and entrepreneurship, the NEP signaled the return of capitalistic practices and a bourgeois way of life. In the NEP circles of new-rich Russian capitalists, Western fashion experienced a true revival. Many prerevolutionary fashion magazines that had been abolished after the revolution reappeared on the market. During the NEP period, the Western-style flapper dress, a simple short tunic, found itself in the company of jazz and Hollywood movies, as attitudes toward Western bourgeois urban culture shifted. In such a climate, the constructivist textile and dress proposals proved too utopian. In contrast, Lamanova’s reinterpreted ethnic motifs were acceptable, as they were decorative but unrelated to the latest Western trends.

Aleksandra Ekster and the Atelier of Fashion. In the still-pluralistic 1920s, other attempts had been made to broker a truce between fashion and Socialism. The designer Aleksandra Ekster was instrumental in starting the Atelier of Fashion (Atel’e Mod) in Moscow, founded in 1923 by the Moscow Clothing Trust. It was supposed to fulfill two tasks: supplying prototypes for mass production and catering to individual customers. In reality, Ekster and her colleagues dressed the new NEP bourgeoisie in highly decorated, luxurious clothes. In the Atelier of Fashion, Ekster developed her concept of multilayered outfits, designing them in brocade, satin, and silk and adorning them with fur and leather trimmings. In 1923, this aesthetic was laid out in a fashion magazine, Atel’e (Atelier), of which only one issue was published. In 1928, the journal Iskusstvo odevat’sia (Art of dressing) revived the Atel’e’s earlier concept of uniting industry, art, fashion, and traditional ethnic motifs. Similar to Atel’e, Iskusstvo odevat’sia was an elitist fashion magazine, vaguely connected to Bolshevik values. Although the prevailing art deco aesthetics, presented in drawings by the artists gathered around the journal, favored a visual merger between Western fashionable dress and Russian ethnic decorations, proposals for working clothes were also published, as well as examples of genuine French fashions and their Russian copies.

The Soviet 1930s

Stalin’s rise to power and the First Five-Year Plan in 1929 brought the commercially oriented NEP to an end and introduced the planned economy. The scientific approach, presented in new manuals such as Sof’ia Beliaeva-Ekzempliarskaia’s Modelirovanie odezhdy po zakonam zritel’nogo vospriiatiia (Dress design according to the laws of visual perception), was given preference in the design and production of clothes, as opposed to the supposed irrationality of Western fashion. Published in 1934, Beliaeva-Ekzempliarskaia’s manual analyzed various theories of form and their application to dress in a serious academic manner and dealt with theories of colors and scientific visualization of rhythm. Centralized textile and clothing industries were supposed to put this scientific approach into practice. At the representational level, Stalinism abolished the pluralism of ideas and dress aesthetics that was still present in the 1920s, from the austere constructivist approach to the Westernized NEP dress styles. In a sharp ideological turn, Stalinism granted fashion a highly representational role and eventually imposed an over-decorated aesthetics of its own on its ideal dress, which matched its main artistic expression, Socialist realism. Drawing on classicist traditions, Socialist realist aesthetics were a pastiche of different visual forms. However, Socialist realism differed from the 1920s modernist avant-garde not only aesthetically but also ideologically. While the avant-garde wanted to change the world, Socialist realism aimed to embellish it.

For Stalinism, smart dress was the perfect medium to channel its new social policies. During the mid-1930s, the Stalinist regime encouraged social distinctions by creating huge disparities in wages and created a new Socialist middle class, which received material goods, from housing to fashion, in exchange for supporting the system. For the first time, Communism recognized the relation of fashion to femininity and adornment, allowing the incorporation of fashion into the new mass culture that was emerging. In the mid-1930s, a huge official campaign to “civilize” the new Socialist middle class dictated, among other things, both good manners and appropriate dress. While the Stepanova’s gender-neutral prozodezhda was an ideological attempt to minimize gender difference, Stalinism reconceptualized gender by returning to the concept of traditional femininity and a curvy female body shape. Stalinist fashion corresponded to Stalinist conservative values. The 1930s dress featured a new aesthetic that blended Russian ethnic tradition and Hollywood glamour.

The Moscow House of Fashion. In 1935, fashion consciousness was officially confirmed as part of Stalin’s mass culture with the opening of the House of Fashion (Dom modelei) in Moscow. The established fashion designer Nadezhda Makarova, who had started her career as Lamanova’s apprentice, was its first director, while Nadezhda Lamanova was appointed artistic consultant. The main task of the designers and sample makers engaged by the House of Fashion was to design genuine Soviet styles and to make prototypes for mass production by huge textile companies. Two luxurious fashion publications, the monthly Zhurnal mod (Fashion journal) and the biannual Modeli sezona (Fashions of the seasons), were designed in the House of Fashion and published under the auspices of the Ministry of Light Industry. In 1937, the same ministry advertised chic hats, fur coats, and perfumes, featuring fashionably dressed and made-up women, contrasting sharply with the real poverty. From the late 1940s on, Houses of Fashion were instituted in the other cities and capitals of the Soviet republics, making clothes production highly controlled and centralized. But in the centrally organized system, which did not recognize the market, access to goods was the main privilege and was determined hierarchically. Clothes and fashion accessories were either too expensive or unattainable for the masses. Whereas the early Bolsheviks wanted to abolish fashion, Stalinism reintroduced it but only at the representational level. The development of fashion was arrested, both by its conservative aesthetics, which did not acknowledge change, and by fashion’s existence exclusively on the pages of glossy magazines and in Stalinist musicals and film melodramas, instead of in real life.

The Late 1940s in East and Central Europe

When the Communists seized power in 1948, the Soviet system of centralized production and distribution of clothes was forced on the East European countries, in spite of their previously higher levels of technical and stylistic skill in clothing design and production. Initially, the East European Communist regimes embraced early Soviet ideology, officially rejecting Western fashion and trying to impose their own versions of production clothes, such as overalls, on their female population. Within the East European utopias, Socialist dress was supposed to be born in a reality that was not only burdened with postwar material poverty but also stripped of all previous fashion references. In that early phase of Communist rule, the image of a robust woman in overalls conquering the countryside on her tractor showed that dress was forbidden to evoke beauty or elegance. It was officially claimed that functional, simple, and classless Socialist dress, which would fulfill all the sartorial needs of working women, would result from serious scientific and technical research. This highly ideologized approach to dress was promoted through the newly founded women’s magazines, published by new women’s organizations that were aligned with the Communist parties in each country.

The idea of an East European utopia and its insistence on simple and functional dress was short-lived. These countries existed under Soviet political influence, and the Soviet Union had already left the utopian phase in the late 1920s. At the beginning of the 1950s, the East European countries abandoned the concept of utopia, which not only differed from contemporary Soviet policies on dress but was also highly contested by the East European population. In exchange, East Europe adopted the Soviet’s optimistic representational dress narrative that promised beautiful garments to everyone. However, since the East and Central European countries had no chance to redevelop their textile and clothing industries in an organic way following the end of World War II, they could not fulfill their promises. Instead, their newly founded central fashion institutions excelled in producing perfect prototypes for domestic and foreign fashion shows and trade fairs.
The 1950s and 1960s in East Europe and the Soviet Union

In the following decades, the East European Communist regimes’ attitudes toward dress and fashion were not only influenced by but also intertwined with political changes in the Soviet Union. A new ideological turn occurred when Nikita Khrushchev affirmed his rule in 1956 and declared war on the excessive Stalinist aesthetics. Leaving the worst practices of Stalinist isolationism behind, Khrushchev opened the Soviet Union to the West. As a result, in the late 1950s, official attitudes toward Western fashion mellowed in the Communist countries. However, Khrushchev’s attempts to mass-produce simple dresses with clean modernist lines were blocked by the over-organized and over-bureaucratized textile and clothing industries. With neither tradition nor market, and aspiring to control fashion change within their centralized fashion systems, the central fashion institutions could not keep up with Western fashion trends. The official version of Socialist fashion stayed true to traditional sartorial expressions and practices of traditional femininity, bearing witness to the regimes’ inability to create a genuine Socialist fashion or, alternatively, adjust to Western fashion trends.

Socialist Fashion Congresses. From the late 1950s on, the official fashions were exhibited in glamorous fashion drawings and photographs in state-owned women’s magazines, representative fashion shows, and ambitious presentations at domestic and foreign trade fairs. However, clothing design, production, and distribution remained highly centralized throughout the Socialist world, eventually leading to serious shortages and decreasing quality. Annual fashion congresses among the Communist countries, at which new fashions were proposed and adopted, began modestly in 1950 as contests in dress culture between Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The nature of these events started to change when the Soviet Union joined the fourth Socialist dress contest, which was held in Prague in 1953. The Soviets introduced opulent evening wear and smart day ensembles that complied with their official aesthetics, which continued to draw on the Stalinist idea of luxury. Accordingly, the name of the event changed from “dress contest” to “fashion congress” in Moscow in 1957.

As the need for an official Socialist fashion increased at the end of the 1950s, when the regimes rushed to clothe their emerging Socialist middle classes in order to compete with Western lifestyles, the fashion congresses became more ambitious. They rotated among the Socialist capitals, and participating countries prepared collections of prototypes for them. The official Socialist fashions included evening wear and day wear consisting of ensembles of overcoats and matching dresses or conservative suits, accompanied by ladylike handbags, high-heeled shoes, hats, and gloves. Even after the central fashion institutions began to propose fashionable dresses on the congress catwalk in the late 1960s, these clothes did not materialize in the shops. The institution of the fashion congress had a strictly representational role until the very end of Socialism in 1989.

International Exhibitions and Trade Fairs. As the race between West and East to industrialize transformed into competition over standards of living and consumption, political and social shifts affected Socialist fashion trends. After decades of Soviet rejection of Western fashion, Christian Dior presented a prominent fashion show in Moscow in 1959 and in Prague in 1966. In 1967, an international fashion festival took place in Moscow, presenting both Western and East European collections. Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s presentation was recognized as the best current trend, but the grand prix was awarded to the Russian designer Tatiana Osmerkina for a dress called “Russia.” Fashion played an important role at the U.S. exhibition in Moscow in 1958, with the guests presenting American high-street fashion to the amazed Russians at the daily catwalk show. At the same time, Central European Socialist countries prepared seriously for the Brussels World Exhibition in 1958. Czechoslovakia won the first award for its presentation at the event, which included glass, ceramics, jewelry, textiles, and clothes. Moreover, the Hungarian collection, consisting of 120 outfits designed by the Hungarian Fashion Institute, mainly smart cocktail dresses, won a grand prix in Brussels. Socialist fashion collections were regularly presented at the Leipzig International Fair, but the Czechs also made serious attempts to reconnect with Western fashion, taking part in the Paris Prêt-à-Porter in autumn 1965 and spring 1966. In contrast, Socialist Yugoslavia did not belong to the centralized and isolated Socialist fashion system due to its break with Stalin in the late 1940s. There, fashion was an important ideological tool to prove that Yugoslav Socialism was better than the Soviet model.

Fashion Magazines. All the ideologically imposed changes in Socialist dress and the concept of gender were mediated through state-owned women’s and fashion magazines. In each country, the concepts of modesty and luxury were promoted through different women’s magazines, which were meant for different audiences and also served the differing needs of each regime. One group of magazines published smart one-of-a-kind dresses, designed and produced within the centralized fashion institutions, and presented them as success stories of the domestic clothing industry. Their style was luxurious but timeless. The other group of magazines, meant for the mass public, recognized the shortages and poor quality of clothes in everyday life. These magazines offered practical advice on making and repairing your own clothes. Moreover, unlike the first group, mass magazines promoted a conventional but modest style, which conformed to Socialist values of modesty and moderation and showed discomfort with individuality and unpredictability. In the end, both representational luxury and everyday modesty opposed and blocked contemporary Western fashion trends and the concept of change that they might have introduced.

Official reconceptualizations of gender were also channeled through women’s magazines. Following the 1917 revolution in Russia and the 1948 Communist coups in East Europe, the ideal was an austere and unadorned woman. In the 1930s, Stalinist media promoted a superwoman who was an exemplary worker, good mother, and political activist but nevertheless groomed and smartly dressed. Against the backdrop of the Cold War in the 1950s, the traditional femininity promoted in Socialist women’s magazines presented a new, softer, and sophisticated face of Socialism to the West. Apart from regular paper patterns for home dressmakers, women’s mass media also published columns on appropriate dress and proper behavior. From the late 1950s on, these educational texts and images of hats and gloves, cocktail dresses, and hairstyles promoted new rules for the female members of the new Socialist middle classes. The official approval of the traditional female ideal reflected the failure to engineer a new Socialist woman. Moreover, the fixed gender difference was embedded in the repressed Socialist market, which was unable to deal with changing and desirable images of femininity. Along with the conventional concept of femininity, Socialist good taste was promoted as well. Introduced in the late 1950s as an official aesthetics and style guide for the emerging middle classes, Socialist good taste incorporated the concepts of elegance and prettiness but insisted that only simplicity is elegant and beautiful.

Everyday Fashion and Alternative Dress

When mass culture and Western youthful dress and music trends could not be held back any longer, the Communist regimes officially recognized a rationalized version of consumption, and the Five-Year Plans in the 1970s and 1980s addressed fashion and appearance concerns. The fashions in the plans, however, did not materialize in the shops. In everyday reality, women in Socialist countries found alternative ways of acquiring clothes, from home dressmaking to the black market, seamstresses, and private fashion salons, which catered to the new ruling elite and, increasingly, the Socialist middle classes. The institution of the dressmaker belonged to the vast field of everyday fashion that the state was unable to control completely. Dressmakers and small fashion salons existed in East and Central Europe as small private enterprises, while the Russians could obtain custom-made clothes through state-owned fashion ateliers. Although private business was illegal in the Soviet Union, the Russians also secretly relied on the services of dressmakers. Paper patterns attached to fashion magazines were important throughout the Socialist world, as they allowed women to achieve a diversity in dress styles that the shops did not provide. Since the regimes discreetly acknowledged the role of do-it-yourself dress in everyday life, the selection of fabrics for home dressmaking was more varied than for mass-produced clothes. This also helped women achieve fashionability and smartness through self-provision.

Scarcities in state shops and black market activity made Western goods particularly attractive. Jeans provide the best example of both the production inadequacies of the planned economies and the futility of their attempts to ignore fashion demands. But women living under Socialism did not necessarily want the latest trends. The aesthetics of Socialist good taste were so strongly promoted through the media that women internalized its rules on smartness and prettiness. Thus, the immaculate personal look became an ideal for millions of women in Socialist countries, who were prepared to make many sacrifices in order to achieve it. From the end of the 1960s on, unofficial channels, with the regimes’ discreet approval, became increasingly important, and dress and beauty practices occupied an important position in the second societies and economies that ran in parallel with the first, official societies and economies. Small fashion salons, shoe-repair shops, hair salons, and beauty parlors offered goods and services that the state did not provide.

Internal geographies of consumption developed within the Socialist world. The Soviet Union lagged behind the East European countries in information and supply, and Soviet women craved better-quality and more fashionable dresses, underwear, and fashion accessories from East and Central Europe. The supply was irregular, but women could occasionally buy them in Moscow in the State Department Store (GUM), as well as on the outskirts of Moscow in shops named after Socialist capital cities, such as Belgrade, Prague, Sofia, Budapest, and Leipzig, which offered reasonably priced goods produced in the respective Socialist countries. In the Soviet Union, citizens who could travel to the West, and thus acquire coveted fashionable items, belonged to the scientific or artistic elites, whereas in Socialist Central Europe, restrictions on travel abroad were relaxed from the 1960s on.

Alternative dress also existed in Socialist countries. In the early 1950s, the Soviet “style hunters” (stiliagi) had counterparts in other Socialist countries, such as the Pásek in Czechoslovakia, the Bikini Boys (Bikiniarze) in Poland, and Jampec in Hungary. Their rebellious dress codes, which paralleled those of the English Teddy Boys, produced the first elements of a Westernized youth subculture that became very important in the following decades. The uniform of these Socialist dandies consisted of a long, loose jacket, drainpipe trousers, thick-soled shoes, colorfully striped socks, and wide ties in bright colors. The hostility toward such alternative dress practices in the media of the 1950s demonstrated the extent of their deviations from established social norms. Alternative dress practices challenged the slow concept of time by introducing fast-changing Western trends. Moreover, due to the fear that an interest in clothes and Western music was unmanly and not suitable for serious workers, the young men associated with subcultures were attacked as either effeminate or hooligans. Such strong media criticism was disproportionate to the small size of these subcultural groups. In fact, alternative dress codes were the only examples when male dress was ideologically challenged. In contrast to ever-changing female fashions, slow-changing conventional male attire did not threaten the system.

From the mid-1950s, in East Europe, alternative dress related to youthful fashions was mainly absorbed into the mainstream youth cultures, while in the Soviet Union it was persistently seen as a serious social threat to the more closed system there. Western rock music arrived in Socialist countries in the mid-1960s; by the 1970s, many domestic rock bands already existed. Youth subcultures, expressing themselves through distinct dress codes, continued to grow throughout the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s, throughout the Socialist world. Each Western youth trend had its Soviet counterpart, from metallisti (heavy metal fans) to khippi (hippies), panki (punks), rokeri (bikers), modniki (trendy people), and breikery (break-dancer). However, the official ambivalence toward Western fashion continued throughout Socialist times, informed by isolationism, fear of uncontrollable fashion changes, and the rejection of the market.