Various issues connected to the design and manufacture of fashion clothing.
By Dr. Jukka Gronow
Professor of Sociology
Uppsala University
By Dr. Sergei Zhuravlev
Senior Researcher
Institute of Russian History
Russian Academy of Sciences
From Parallel Organizations
The first Soviet fashion organizations were created in the period just before and just after the Second World War but the decades from 1960 to 1980 could be called the period of the real institutionalization of Soviet fashion as this was when the system reached its full extent. Hundreds of large and small design organizations were established. Thousands of professional designers and pattern makers worked in these organizations and their numbers continued to increase in the thirty year period after the war. In the Soviet Union the state financed all the organizations engaged in fashion design although these organizations belonged to several different administrative departments or ministries, which all organized their own departments, networks, educational systems and parallel institutes of design.
In addition to such design institutes, the ministries also founded a number of scientific institutes and laboratories which all, in some way, engaged in creating the foundations for the design and manufacture of clothing. In the Soviet context, even fashion design had to have a solid scientific foundation. In this chapter we shall systematically explore the various scientific organizations researching and producing fashion as well as the various issues connected to the design and manufacture of fashion clothing.
At least four main administrative systems were engaged in fashion design which achieved their final structure in the late 1960s: the Ministry of Light Industry (fashion design for the purposes of industrial mass production), the Ministry of Everyday Services (designs for custom sewing in fashion ateliers), as well as the Ministries of both Trade and Local Industry. (Fig. 1.) The first two ministries were economically the most important in the field of consumption and therefore we shall pay more attention to them in what follows. We shall analyze the specifics of fashion design in the trade organizations and will take the fashion department of GUM, the State Department Store in Moscow as a specific example in the next chapter.
Contrary to what one might expect considering the highly centralized and planned Soviet economic system, no single center of administration or unified centralized organization existed for fashion design. In fact, the idea of the necessity of increasing specialization as the best solution to the problems of fashion design and clothing production acted as the main antithesis to the principle of strict centralization of administration. Indeed, it motivated the foundation of the new fashion houses under the Ministry of the Light Industry as well as a whole system of separate organizations for custom made clothing within the republican Ministries of Everyday Service. The ministries that were responsible for providing the population with new and better clothes often referred to this principle in lobbying for their own administrative interests, in particular for the necessity of establishing their own new fashion organizations which, as a rule, also demanded additional financial resources from the state budget. Despite the fact that these parallel structures often existed in the same town and engaged in the same kind of activities, their work was not coordinated and they hardly cooperated with each other at all.
In practice the different administrative units acted independently and autonomously from each other, and in relation to some creative issues as well as in their appeals to consumers they often openly competed with each other. After the economic reforms of the 1960s the Soviet consumer goods enterprises had to earn money and become self-financing. They soon discovered that they were in fact competing with each other for the same markets. In addition, they had unofficial competitors: private tailors and seamstresses and even black market operations. Competition from the black market was even more significant in the enterprises under the Ministry of Everyday Services, which often felt the pressure in relation to both the prices and quality of the goods produced by unofficial competitors. In the context of the chronic shortage of fashionable clothes such competition had, however, a limited effect in practice. However, reports witnessing the existence of strong ambitions among the directors of the units as well as among the designers should not be ignored, nor should the role of the official socialist competition between the fashion organizations. On the other hand, it is equally evident that this tendency towards administrative specialization could be characterized in less positive terms, with the overlapping of their functions, parallelism and unnecessary waste of the financial resources of the state. This becomes evident in the light of the fact that despite the enormous quantity of new designs the Soviet consumers mostly could not buy the fashionable, higher quality clothes they desired. This raised the question of the extent to which these organizations were actually engaged in useful activities. This theme was openly discussed in the Soviet press and among experts throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Many reasonable measures were suggested in order to improve the situation, some of which were also realized in practice. Often the decisions taken on the governmental level did not have the expected effects because other conditions did not favor them. The Soviet economic system in fact often opposed them. Gradually, the leaders and the planning offices became aware that one could not really regulate such a delicate and rapidly changing sphere as fashion with the same administrative directives as were common in the other fields of the Soviet economy.
The search for more adequate forms of administration led to the emergence, in the 1960s and 1970s, of the so-called main organizations of design, which received additional authority and the status of inter-administrative units. This was true in particular of the four All-Union houses of fashion design under the Ministry of Light Industry: one designing clothes on the Kuznetskii Most street, and one each for knitwear, shoes, and other leather items. They had the responsibility for studying current fashions and future trends (each in its own particular field) and presenting their ideas to the special annual sessions of designers and pattern makers active in their own administrative system.
The directives of these main fashion organizations and the decisions made during the working meetings about the tendencies of fashion (shape, contour, style, colors, etc.) were officially only recommendations. They offered a kind of general orientation to the designers and pattern makers working all over the country. As was generally understood, it would have been impossible to predict the fashion trends with total certainty in advance. Later on these recommendations were reinforced by orders of the Ministry of Light Industry but this procedure was mainly a formality. In any case, neither the archives nor interviews with the former workers revealed any cases of someone being punished or reprimanded for not following these recommendations from the main institutions. Local and regional cultural or religious factors played an important role in Soviet fashion too. For example miniskirts or bikinis, popular in the European parts of the USSR in the 1970s, never made their appearance in the Asian Soviet Republics with predominantly Muslim populations.
At the end of the 1960s yet another main organization was created that came to have an enormous role in promoting the unity of the tendencies of fashion and approaches to design in the whole country. It had a typically long administrative name: the All-Union Institute of Product Assortment and the Culture of Dress under the Ministry of Light Industry. However, just like many other Soviet administrative organizations it was generally known by its acronym VIALegprom. While the All-Union houses of fashion design functioned practically autonomously in relation to each other, each one within their own field of specialization (the design of clothes, knitwear, shoes or leather items), VIALegprom was created to overcome the disadvantages of such specialization and to coordinate their activities by putting the principle of the design of complex collections of clothing into practice. At the same time, VIALegprom approached the concrete demands of the consumer. It was thought that a person wanted to be fashionable and beautiful in general and not just wear fashionable clothes and shoes. In order to achieve this result, one had to work scientifically, to study and to agree on the present and future perspectives of fashion in practically everything, including the colors and types of textiles and other materials (for instance, leather and fur), the style of dress as well as the shoes, hats, underwear, hairstyles and cosmetics. VIALegprom was engaged in this work, leaving ODMO behind in the 1970s in the hierarchy of fashion in the Soviet Union.
The General Structure of the Design Organizations at the Ministry of Light Industry
The Ministry of the Light Industry, with its big factories, was an All-Union Ministry and the main producer of consumer goods in the country. This included women’s, men’s and children’s garments, shoes, hats and underwear, accessories, and so on. Its predecessor, the People’s Commissariat of Light Industry was founded in 1932 and it became the Ministry of Light Industry in 1946. It was closed down in 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Historically, the majority of its enterprises were located in the Russian part of the country with a minority in Ukraine. It was therefore natural that the majority of the design organizations serving clothes factories were also located in these regions. In addition to the All-Union Ministry, each Soviet Republic, including Russia, had its own Ministry of Light Industry with its own Republican fashion institutes. They formed a strictly hierarchical network of administrative units. In the following we shall first present the main institutes of fashion design that worked under the Ministry of Light Industry, among which MDMO/ODMO and VIAlegprom were most prominent, before focusing on the fashion design that went on under other Soviet Ministries.
The 1960s were an important stage in the development of Soviet fashion design since the authorities acknowledged that the country had largely neglected to take care of the production of consumer goods. The consumer goods industry initiated many reforms to improve the situation by further specialization and concentration. It received remarkable additional finances and new production machinery. It was thought that as far as the enterprises had a duty to renew their assortment of clothing following the latest fashion trends and the orders from trade (presumably answering the customer’s demand) the enterprises needed continuously new designs. Fashion would thus act as a major force of innovation and progress.
The profession of the designer became quite popular. Like mushrooms after a rain, new fashion design organizations “popped up” everywhere. According to the statistics published in the professional journal Shveinaya promyshlennost’ (The Garment Industry), in the five year period between 1960 and 1965 about 40 new fashion organizations came into being in the consumer goods industry. Almost as many were opened in the area of shoe design.210 Twenty years later, in 1984, 62 houses of fashion design worked under the Ministry of Light Industry, among them 38 in clothing design, 16 in shoe design, 5 houses in knitwear and 3 houses in work clothing design. They employed 2 802 designers and almost as many pattern makers.211 This “army of fashion” produced thousands of new designs for Soviet industry each year.
The system of fashion design under the Ministry of Light Industry consisted of several parts. The republican (in the capital cities of the Soviet republics) and regional (in other larger cities) houses of fashion design were headed by the All-Union House of Fashion Design, ODMO on the Kuznetskii Most street in Moscow, which coordinated their work and was responsible for advice and instructions. Some of them designed only clothes but the majority had multiple functions and also designed shoes, hats and accessories.212 Their main task was to provide the factories in their own republics or regions with new designs. This was so that the clothes that were designed and sewn in a particular region would take local conditions and demand into account. erefore they were also ideally supposed to be sold mainly in the same region.
The general political line from the1960s to the 1980s was to strengthen the importance of these newly established regional fashion organizations. Following the example of ODMO they opened experimental departments which worked out their own “directional collections with a future perspective.” These were the Soviet collections of high fashion. They also started to participate in the creation of the prestigious, trend-setting All-Union collections. Before the 1970s the specialists of only a few houses – ODMO in Moscow plus the design houses in Leningrad, Kiev and Riga – were allowed to participate in this important work. Gradually, even smaller republican and regional houses started travelling abroad with “foreign” collections of their own.
Some houses of fashion design specialized in the design of all outer apparel besides clothing. The design of shoes, knitwear, leather wear, special or work clothes as well as sportswear all had their own houses. For example, some houses of fashion design specialized in socks and stockings as well as outerwear made of knit fabric. In the 1960s, they made about 2 500 designs every year.213
In addition to the central houses in Moscow, all the major Soviet republics (Russia, Ukraine and Belarus among others) had their own specialized republican houses of design. (Fig. 2.) These worked for the needs of the specialized industrial conglomerates under the Ministry of Light Industry. Shoes, for instance, were designed both at ODMO in Moscow and at the Chelyabinsk House of Shoe Design.
The design of special and work clothes was entrusted to a separate organization in the middle of the 1960s. Before that the considerations of fashion had been deemed irrelevant to working clothes, which were supposed to be primarily functional and practical. However, by the decree of the Soviet of the Ministers of the USSR on the 23rd of July, 1962, the Ministry of Light Industry was given the task of founding the necessary design departments for working clothes.214 On the 24th of November in 1964, the main Party newspaper Pravda reported that the Soviet government had discussed the question of the improvement of the quality and aesthetic character of such special clothes. As a result new state norms for working clothes were taken into use and special attention was paid to the design of all kinds of work clothes.215 All-Union competitions, in which the best designers of the country took part, were organized regularly to reveal the best designs in work wear. In 1970 the Moscow Experimental Garment Factory was nominated as the main enterprise in the field of producing new clothing designs for the workers and employees in all the fields of the Soviet economy.216
In the mid-1970s, it was transformed into the House of Design of Special and Working Clothes under the Russian Ministry of Light Industry. This was an important event which received a lot of publicity in the Soviet press: the USSR was proudly declared to be the only country in the world where the best fashion designers designed the working clothes of ordinary people together with exclusive evening dresses. (Fig. 3.).
In addition to the territorial and specialized Houses of Design, the bigger enterprises of light industry founded their own departments of fashion design, research and development departments and laboratories. The plans of the enterprises obliged them to regularly renew the lists of their products. Bigger clothing factories employed dozens of professional designers and pattern makers. As a rule, the factories were supposed to order the majority of their new designs from the territorial or special houses of fashion design of clothes; they were officially assigned to produce only a small number of these designs themselves. The proportion of their own and external designs was not, however, strictly determined or stable from one year to the next. It also varied from one enterprise to another. In practice, the individual factories often tried to establish a maximal degree of autonomy and thus in fact competed with the houses of fashion design to which they were officially assigned.
The fact that the regional houses of design were supposed to service the local enterprises caused other problems too. For instance, the designer at the House of Fashion Design at Barnaul, Altai region, could be almost certain that his or her designs would never be sewn with the much better machinery of the Moscow factory of the same Ministry. The Altai factories were expected to cooperate mainly with the local Altai House of Fashion Design to which they were ocially attached. In principle, the local clothing factory was allowed to cooperate even with other houses of fashion design under the Ministry of Light Industry. In practice, this was however quite difficult since such an unorganized, free distribution of orders would, in authorities’ opinion, lead to chaos and open competition between the various fashion institutions and was therefore not encouraged. As everyone knew, there were both professionally strong and highly experienced fashion organizations as well as weaker ones, like the new ones located in the smaller provincial cities. It was obvious to everyone that, if allowed, factories would order designs only from the best designers. In that case some houses would be inflated with orders at the cost of the others, which would not be able to fulfill their quotas since they could not compete with their prices. The Ministry tried to solve this problem and standardize the general level of designs by, for instance, giving extra support to the recently established weaker regional organizations.
There were certainly exceptions to the general rule. For instance, the Houses of Fashion Design at both Riga and Tallinn, not situated in the bigger Soviet centers, received a lot of orders from the factories in the territory of Russia because of their good reputation and Western image. But the main exception was the All-Union House of Fashion Design, ODMO at Moscow. The Ministry actively distributed its designs all over the country in order to improve the general quality of clothing production. To sum up, a garment factory at Sverdlovsk was supposed to mainly make use of the designs of the local Sverdlovsk House of Fashion Design as well as the designs worked out in its own research and development department. Only as an extra addition did it have the right to buy a restricted number of designs from ODMO and even more rarely from the other leading Soviet houses.
In 1968 about 20 enterprises from the Moscow region were officially assigned to ODMO and ordered new designs from Kuznetkii Most street. In addition, 234 clothing factories from the “periphery” sewed clothes using ODMO’s designs. In 1969 as many as 297 factories from the different regions ordered ODMO’s designs.217
The factories had the right and the obligation to order new designs from the houses of fashion design. They had to pay a price set by the state for these services. The factories were often interested, out of purely economic considerations, in designing their clothes themselves. The state did not approve of such a practice. The professional services of these houses of fashion design were not very expensive. For example, in the end of the 1970s the price a factory had to pay for one new design of male clothes (an overcoat, a dress suit, and a raincoat) including the template and the whole technical documentation and set of instructions was 546 rubles.218 (At the same time the monthly salary of a university professor was 300–400 rubles.)
In the 1960s, the cultural, propagandistic functions of the houses of fashion design at the Ministry as well as at the other administrative units became more important. Their departments engaged in the propagation of fashion and the culture of dress as well as strengthening the education of good taste among the population. The directors of the houses as well as their designers, pattern makers and artistic consultants started to appear regularly in the central and local press, radio broadcasts and TV reports. As is evident from the newspaper clippings and journal articles preserved in ODMO’s library, hundreds of local newspapers had regular columns dedicated to fashion and the culture of dress. They were often written by the specialists working in the local fashion organizations. The local houses of fashion design gradually started to play an important role in the cultural life of the Soviet provinces. Judging from the local press, their leading designers became celebrities well known and respected in their own town and region. The local political and cultural elite used the services of these houses of fashion design too.
The Center Point of Soviet Fashion: The All-Union House of Fashion Design, ODMO
All through the post-war decades, the All-Union House of Fashion Design, ODMO was a leading institute of fashion design in the Soviet Union. It was a combination of a research institute, a design factory, and an exhibition center. From the second half of the 1960s until the collapse of the Soviet Union its structure remained more or less the same. It had several workshops, specialized departments and divisions: the design of men’s fashion, the design of women’s clothes and underwear, the design of children’s wear, as well as the design of fur clothes and headwear. In addition it had a department for the preparation of industrial templates, for the practical adaptation of designs for industrial production, for making instructional patterns for the general population, for the propaganda of fashion and for running the exhibition hall. Finally it had an experimental department.
In the 1960s to the 1980s, the collective of ODMO counted 700–800 employees including 70 designers and about as many pattern makers. In those years ODMO worked out over four thousand new designs a year, though it should be noted that every design did not necessarily go through the whole process from first sketch to final production template. Hardly any other institute of fashion design could have competed with ODMO in terms of the amount of designers and designs. It was common knowledge that ODMO had the best fashion professionals in the Soviet Union. All new designs passed through the inspection of its artistic council, the head of which was the deputy minister of the consumer goods industry.
Two different seasonal collections (for both autumn-winter and spring-summer) were created every year from the new designs at ODMO and the other regional houses of fashion design: the first was the trend-setting collection of fashion (the Soviet analogue of haute couture), which gave “directions” to the other design organizations and the garment factories, helping them to orient themselves to the perspectives of fashion a couple of years ahead of time. The second kind were the so-called industrial collections, which had been worked out on the basis of the directive collections of the previous years.
The designs of the industrial collections were meant to be taken into production without any delay. Therefore, they not only followed present fashion but, distinctly from the designs of trend-setting fashion, they could easily be adapted to the various norms, standards and technical possibilities of mass production at Soviet factories. The seasonal collections had 120–150 items of clothing in various categories, from ordinary and work clothes to formal dress and wedding gowns. Periodically ODMO also received special orders, for example for school uniforms, uniforms for the pioneers’ summer camps, and fine clothing for delegations of sportsmen or other groups representing the country abroad. One of ODMO’s main tasks was to regularly supply the enterprises located in the capital area with new industrial designs. These factories were supposed to renew their production lists at regular intervals and therefore, following their economic contracts, they turned to ODMO in good time and ordered and paid for new designs of particular types of clothes. Alternatively, they could buy examples that had already been demonstrated at an exhibition.219
After the second half of the 1960s, the role of ODMO grew remarkably stronger as the All-Union center of general coordination and instruction in relation to the other republican and regional organizations. An order of the Ministry of Light Industry on the 18th of September 1969 gave ODMO the leading role in questions of industrial and trend-setting design and in the preparation and distribution of the necessary methodical materials, and obliged it to give all kinds of practical help to all the republican and regional houses of fashion design.220 ODMO regularly organized working meetings, both All-Union and geographically more limited ones, for the co-workers of the various design institutions, the task of which was to inform the specialists coming from all over the country of the present trends in fashion as well as to discuss emerging problems and to exchange experiences in fashion design and pattern making. These meetings contributed naturally to the development of a general policy and common style.
The leading French fashion houses were consistently the main reference point for the Soviet fashion experts and authorities. Among all the Parisian fashion houses Dior’s played an exceptional role. Moscow’s relation to the House of Dior was very close for most of the post-war era.221 Christian Dior’s Fashion House visited Moscow with a three day fashion exhibition as early as June 1959. This event could be compared to a great diplomatic accomplishment and it duly received a lot of attention both at home and abroad. A Soviet delegation visited Dior’s fashion house in Paris in 1957, 1960 and 1965. This close collaboration even gave cause to a quite spectacular bit of news according to which certain Dior models would eventually be mass produced in the Soviet Union in the 1960s.222 There were many reasons – partly accidental – why it was particularly Dior who came to play the role of an early godfather to Soviet fashion, but his rather classic and conservative style, exemplified in the famous New Look of the late 1940s, probably appealed aesthetically to the leaders of the Soviet consumer goods industry.
At the order of the Soviet government ODMO prepared one collection after another for foreign exhibitions, all expected to be on the level of world fashion both as far as their general design and more directly as far as the individual garments were concerned.223 The year 1953 was important in this respect since the USSR for the first time took part in the International Competition of Fashion at Prague. Later on these competitions among the designers of the socialist countries became regular, annual events. In 1957 Moscow organized the 6th International Youth Festival, which in many ways symbolized the new post-Stalinist opening of the country to the world. ODMO’s artists designed special costumes for the Soviet delegation on this occasion. The year 1967 witnessed the International Fashion Festival at Moscow, an extremely important event in the Soviet history of fashion which definitively legitimized the role of fashion and fashion design in the Soviet Union in particular and under socialism in general. For this occasion ODMO naturally designed a special collection of its own. The Soviet exhibition at the International World Fair in Montreal, EXPO-67, in the same year, was almost as important for the future of Soviet fashion. Fashion exhibitions were an essential part of many Soviet trade exhibitions, like the ones held at Earl’s Court in London.224 The New York Times, for instance, published a report of such a show in 1968 (7 August) with the title “The Russians Put on a Show – a Stylish One.” (Fig. 4.)
Some Soviet designs and designers were well received early on and became well known abroad. For instance, at the International Competition of Fashion of the socialist countries in 1958 the designer Vera Ippolitovna Aralova from ODMO received two first prizes for her dresses with a straight silhouette of a Russian shirt, Plakhta and Suzdal, made out of artificial silk and designed following old Russian folk motifs.225 Ten years later, Tatiana Osmerkina’s design Rossiya in carnation pink and stylized after an ancient Russian icon received an enthusiastic response. The model Liudmila Romanovskaya, a typical Russian beauty, demonstrated it.226 This dress, which many even now regard as the most successful achievement of Soviet fashion design, was well received first at the International Fashion Festival in Moscow in 1967 and at the international exhibition EXPO-67 in Montreal. Later on, it became a standard item in the collections of ODMO that were demonstrated in various countries around the world. This was a good example of how the Soviet experts treated their best creations like individual works of art that kept their aesthetic and functional value almost eternally, becoming classics.
Irina Krutikova’s (also from ODMO, moved later to VIALegprom) collection of fur clothes, among them suede coats, caught the attention of many foreign visitors at the Moscow International Fashion Festival in 1967. This was the first time that a Soviet designer demonstrated a complete collection of her own and not just individual items as a part of a bigger Soviet or All-Union collection. It was common for the Soviet collections to be compilations of the designs of several designers who worked in the same fashion organization, like ODMO. In 1968 a delegation of the Ministry of Light Industry took one of Krutikova’s creations to Paris where the Soviet model Tamara Vladimirtseva demonstrated it with great success as a part of Louis Ferro’s autumn-winter collection of 1968–1969. During a few days of the fashion show the foreign specialists had a chance to see three Soviet designs, two in each individual show. Tamara Vladimirtseva was, according to Soviet standards, very thin.227 This was the first, in those times sensational, success of Soviet designers in the West.228
During this same time, 1967–1968, the talents of a young designer at ODMO, Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Zaitsev, were recognized abroad. He became the best known Soviet designer, called the “Red Dior” abroad. He designed for the two abovementioned exhibitions, at Moscow and Montreal, a small collection of his own called “The Ancient Russ” following the motifs of ancient Russian architecture. These were demonstrated asa part of the general collection of ODMO and received high grades from the international experts. As a consequence, in January 1968 the American term Celanese Fibers Co made a deal with ODMO, having in mind the prospect of cooperating with Zaitsev, in particular, regarding the creation of a collection of women’s fashion with Russian motifs with synthetic fabrics of their own production. The purpose of the contract was to make the clothes of the American firm more competitive on the international markets. Three leading designers from ODMO, Irina Krutikova, Lina Telegina, and Zaitsev, made a collection of 30 items (according to some sources 45 items). Each of the three designers designed about ten items including both ordinary and formal clothes, like cocktail dresses. (Fig. 5.)
After a successful demonstration for the representatives of the firm Celanese in 1969 the collection was exhibited in the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. The New York Times wrote that “although designed in the Government-controlled Moscow House of Fashion, most of the designs reflected the splendor of Tsarist Russia.”229 The May issue of the Sovetskii export, the official journal of the Ministry of Foreign Trade, appreciated this American contract highly, writing in the article “Clothes to America” that “the designs were sold for the prices common for the items of the best designers of Western Europe.” Pictures were also attached to the article of the models and designers demonstrating their clothes for Celanese. The picture of Zaitsev had the inscription: “V. Zaitsev, an artist of infallible taste, one of those who appreciates original and brave solutions. These designs enjoy a huge demand abroad.”230
At about the same time, from the end of 1966 to the end of 1968, ODMO played an important part in the efforts of Soviet economic expansion into the West. These efforts were initiated both by the Ministry of Light Industry and the Ministry of Foreign Trade and were actively supported by the whole Soviet government. Since the Soviet Union had a chronic lack of foreign currency and since Soviet fashion – Russian imperial style – seemed to be popular abroad, a decision was made to design, with the help of the best designers, collections which could be sold in the West.231 The task was completed. In 1967–1968 such “commercial” collections were in fact demonstrated in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, West Germany, Great Britain and Japan. The foreign firms were, however, not overly enthusiastic and after the tragic events of 1968 in Czechoslovakia and the following worsening of relations with the West the initiative was given up.
The need to successfully demonstrate Soviet fashion abroad in international arenas opened up new and broader opportunities for the Soviet experts to study and learn from the international experience of fashion design and pattern construction, by, for instance, having better access to the Western literature, fashion journals and study trips abroad. The library of ODMO regularly subscribed to the leading international fashion journals. ODMO’s experts translated and studied them and, using them, compiled their own reports on the basic trends of international fashion, in general and in different subfields, like men’s and women’s fashion, sportswear, and so on.
In line with the growth in the importance of international contacts,a need arose to construct a Soviet analogy to haute couture on the basis of the trend-setting seasonal collections of fashion. (Fig. 6.) Thus the collections demonstrated on the podium became high priority at ODMO. The proportion of this kind of haute couture gradually increased too: according to the annual reports of ODMO in the second part of the 1960s its share was about one third of all the annual designs.232 A new kind of a designer was demanded who could design clothes creatively for the colorful fashion shows. These designers were expected to be professionals with original ideas and creative dispositions. In the 1960s a generational change indeed took place at ODMO. Viacheslav Zaitzev, Tatiana Osmerkina, Lina Telegina, Yulia Denisova, Svetlana Kocharava, Tamara Mokeyeva (later to become Raisa Gorbachova’s designer), Aleksandr Danilovich Igmand (Leonid Brezhnev’s designer) and others gradually occupied the leading positions at the institute.
At the same time, the models changed too. New professional demands were directed at them: to better follow the international standards of appearance and to learn how to act more professionally on the podium. In 1962 alone, as many as 23 models had to leave their positions at ODMO.233 A special group of elite models soon appeared who demonstrated clothes mainly at the international exhibitions or in the demonstrations attached to the selection of the important directive collections. Since it was the special research and development department which dealt with the design of the Soviet haute couture and since each individual dress was sewn for an actual model these “elite” models at ODMO were mainly attached to this department. (Fig. 7.)
At the same time, ODMO was engaged in propagating fashion and the culture of dress among the Soviet population. The visitors to the Kuznetskii Most could take part in lectures, have a look at the permanent exhibitions and buy drawings or patterns and instructions for the best designs. Three two hour shows took place at the demonstration hall every day except Monday. They enjoyed great popularity among the Muscovites and the visitors to the capital, foreign diplomats and journalists. Those in power certainly monitored the workings of the main Soviet organization of fashion design closely, but this also meant that it enjoyed some privileges. The artistic council, headed by the deputy minister, approved of the seasonal collections as a rule.234 The council took just as seriously its task of checking and approving the collections aimed at international exhibitions. In addition, many other leading workers of the Party and the government who had some professional relation to the production of clothes, the culture and ideology of dress visited ODMO every now and then. In the 1960s and 1970s ODMO became a kind of cultural center in Moscow, attracting young people from among the artistic and scientific circles. People came there hoping to get acquainted with modern fashion as well as the popular fashion designers, and possibly also in order to get one’s clothes made by them (like the film director Andrey Tarkovsky). Some also certainly came there attracted by the possibility of meeting the beautiful models. Many actors and actresses well known from the Soviet film and theater world also became regular guests: Valentin Gaft whose first wife Elena Izergina was a model at ODMO, Andrei Mironov who had a romantic relationship with the model Romanovskaya, Nikita Mikhalkov, later to become a world famous film director and married to the ODMO model Tatiana Shigayeva, and others.
Even though officially ODMO did not engage in the sewing of custom made clothes to individual order, the best designers in the country did serve personally, as an exception, the cultural and political elite, at times even creating new designs for their important clients. According to the official accounts, every year ODMO filled over 100 such VIP orders sanctioned by its own Ministry. these clients included famous Soviet actresses and singers, for example, the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater Maya Plisetskaya, Klavdia Shul’zhenko, Muslim Magomayev, Iosif Kobson, Edita P’ekha, Alla Pugacheva who represented the country abroad and at home and were therefore entitled to the highest standards of dress. But even other well-known public figures or their close relatives had their clothes made at ODMO, starting with the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, the wife of Mikhail Gorbachev Raisa Maksimovna, the Minister of Culture Ekaterina Furtseva, the daughter of the Soviet Prime Minister Aleksey Kosygin, Liudmila Gvishiani, and ending with the first female astronaut, Valentina Tereshkova. These close, often personal ties with the leaders of the country emphasized the exceptionally strong and central role of ODMO in the Soviet system of fashion. However, from the end of the 1960s, the main institute of fashion research at the Ministry of Light Industry was no longer formally ODMO but the newly founded VIALegprom which now became the “crown on the head” of the extensive system of Soviet fashion. Nevertheless, due to its long and valuable experience in the work of fashion ODMO preserved its importance and became the right hand of VIALegprom until the collapse of the USSR.
Standardizing Soviet Clothing Sizes: TsNIIShP and Other Scientific Research and Construction Organizations at the Ministry of Light Industry
In addition to the houses of fashion design, the scientific research institutes and technical pattern construction bureaus at the Ministry of the Light Industry were important units in the Soviet system of fashion design. The task of such applied research was to provide the field of fashion with the most advanced scientific and technological advice and instructions. The state, which financed this extensive and expensive structure, naturally expected to get its money back in the form of new applications of science and technology for production.
The Central Scientific Research Institute of the Garment Industry (TsNIIShP) was the leading organization, the task of which was to develop the design and technology of clothing construction, to analyze the materials to be used in sewing and develop the practical qualities of the clothes in use. In the 1960s, TsNIIShP had several laboratories dedicated to, for example, the construction of practical clothing, the technology of the garment industry, the knowledge of materials, the clothing hygiene, and the design, construction and technology of industrial clothes. In 1965, the Institute employed five fashion designers and several dozen pattern makers and textile engineers.
It was founded as early as 1930 to provide the garment industry with scienti c innovations. In the middle of the 1930s it worked out the first ever Soviet systematic and standardized method of industrially mass producing clothes.235 However, it never really succeeded in establishing itself before the war, which had devastating effects on the quality of mass-produced clothes up to the 1960s. For instance, for a very long time there were no anthropological data about the population of the Soviet Union which could be used to determine the different sizes and patterns when sewing clothes industrially. TsNIIShP, together with the department of anthropology at Moscow State University, conducted such systematic measurements for the first time in 1957–1965. Citizens of both sexes were measured in all the different regions and parts of the country, from the Far East to the Baltic Sea, from the Arctic regions to the Black Sea. After that the measures of the most commonly met figures were classified and codified.236 On their basis, about 100 standard measures were calculated for both women and men. In consequence, the garment industry, the fashion houses, and the clothing trade had a unified set of scientifically founded standard human figures at their disposal for the first time. All this allowed, from the 1960s onward, improvement of the quality of mass-produced clothes, a better fit for different figures, as well as an increase in the variety of ready-made clothes for sale.
These new standard measures covered about 80 percent of all the various human figures, making it in principle possible for almost everyone to find readymade clothes in the shops that would fit without any need of additional adjustment. This was a great leap forward and followed the international example of those years. But what was to be done with the rest of the population, making up almost one fifth of all Soviets, who did not have these standard figures? Just like in other countries, they had the choice to buy readymade clothes and adjust them later, to sew clothes themselves, or to turn to one of the numerous Soviet ateliers of custom made clothes.
In 1966–1967, as a consequence of the standardization of the clothing industry within the COMECON, the Institute of Garment Industry conducted new anthropometric studies among the adult and adolescent population of the USSR. This resulted in the unified typology of the measures of the COMECON countries which led further, in 1974, to the development of the general standards for the clothing industry of the whole Eastern bloc. In the mid-1970s, 93 standard male figures and 105 female gures were determined which the clothing industry was to use in sewing garments.237 In the following decades, the TsNIIShP had various tasks. It had the responsibility of analyzing the new synthetic textiles which started to appear in clothing production in the USSR to make sure that they would not cause any harm to the health of the population. After 1970 the selection and buying of textiles from other countries followed the standards developed by the scientific laboratories. For instance, in evaluating the merits of jeans that could be imported to the USSR in the 1970s the same standards were used as far as their durability, resistance to folding and wrinkling and endurance of washing were concerned. Durability and long life were the main criteria of good quality. It did not occur to anyone that textiles that did not tolerate washing well and were soft and easily folding could be more fashionable and even more comfortable to wear. At the same time the secret laboratory number ten of the Institute conducted research, together with the Scientific Institute of Aviation and Cosmic Medicine of the Ministry of Defense, on suits for cosmonauts and pilots, from their underwear to their overalls.238 They all needed their own designers too. The laboratories at TsNIIShP also constructed special clothes for polar expeditions and for work in extremely warm conditions. The designers of the Institute had the important task of taking care that these special clothes were not only practical and comfortable but also beautiful and fashionable.
In the beginning of the 1970s the researchers at TsNIIShP were asked to prepare recommendations regarding the needed renewal of the clothing price approval system. No Soviet product could be sold before it had passed the rather complicated and bureaucratic procedure of price control. Until 1972, this was the duty of the State Committee for Prices of each Soviet republic. For instance, all the garment factories in the Russian Federation had to send their clothing designs and the attached technical documentation to the State Committee for Prices of the Russian Federation. Understandably, on many occasions the designs went out of fashion before their prices had been properly approved. Fashion design would therefore have greatly benefitted from a more flexible and decentralized system of price setting.
In 1972 TsNIIShP did in fact take the initiative to change this system of price setting for men’s and women’s clothes. The old norms regulating the use of textiles, dating back to Stalin’s times, were now abolished and at the same time the degree of diculty in sewing the garment was taken into account in determining its price. These recommendations were approved and a new price list came into being in 1974. This reform gave a remarkable stimulus to the factories to take more fashionable clothes into production. At the same time, the garment industry was given the right to determine their prices without the interference of the State Committee for Prices, which saved a lot of time and greatly sped up the production of fashionable garments as well as their appearance in the shops. However, the reform at that point concerned only coats, trousers, suits and dresses. Other clothing items had to wait until 1979–1981 for the price control to become more exible.
The Highest Authority of Soviet Fashion: All-Union Institute of Product Assortment and Culture of Dress under the Ministry of Light Industry, VIALegprom
VIALegprom was founded in 1958 to become the highest authority in the field of fashion design and the propaganda of fashion in the USSR. It again was an integral part of a bigger network of similar organizations in the other Eastern European socialist countries within the COMECON.
According to its founding statutes, VIALegprom had several important functions similar to ODMO’s. It took in fact over the role of ODMO as the leading Soviet institute of fashion. Among its tasks were to study the assortment of items produced by Soviet industry, to choose and control the best textiles and clothes to be used, and to study and distribute the most advanced experiences of fashion design in the Soviet Union and abroad. VIALegprom’s tasks also included the technical and aesthetic instruction of the activities of the houses of fashion design and the other organizations involved in fashion design within the Ministry, and to coordinate the work of its enterprises and organizations in order to create collections and whole sets of clothes, shoes, head wear, etc. It was also expected to actively propagate Soviet fashion.239 Until then no one had analyzed and coordinated in earnest the creation of harmonious totalities of dress, their color scales, silhouettes, stylistic themes, technological details, etc. in producing whole sets of clothes as well as whole collections.240 These innovative measures are still impressive even though their practical realization faced many problems.241
Starting in the end of the 1960s, the institute received additional functions and authority in coordinating the work of the other organizations of fashion design, greatly increased its staff and moved to a brand new ten floor building in central Moscow specially constructed for it. Several new designers, Irina Krutikova among them, were employed in the research and development department. Departments analyzing consumer demand, the propaganda of Soviet fashion and the culture of dress, and the advertising of fashionable clothes were all among its new additions.
Its publishing activities advanced too. VIALegprom started producing its own advertisement films. For instance, in the 1980s it prepared a movie for every meeting of its artistic council which was then distributed to all the main organizations of fashion design in the USSR. At the same time, the publication of its three major fashion journals continued: Zhurnal mod (The Fashion Journal), Modeli sezona (The Fashion of the Season; first issue in spring 1959), and Mody stran sotsializma (Fashion from the Socialist Countries).242
Organizations analogous to VIALegprom were established in the Soviet republics. The most important among them were the Special Artistic Bureau of Construction (SHKB) in the Russian Ministry of Light Industry and the Ukrainian Institute of Product Assortment and Culture of Dress. They both had their own experimental departments with their fashion designers and models.
The department of the theory of fashion was considered to be the leading part of VIALegprom. It made prognoses of the fashion trends, for the purpose of which it analyzed the development of international fashion. It also regularly summarized and compiled brochures on the tendencies of international fashion using international fashion journals and other available information sources. These were then distributed in a couple of hundred copies to all the republican and regional fashion institutions.
After its move to the new building it was the only organization in the Soviet Union that had a demonstration hall that was specially built for the purpose of fashion shows. The other demonstration halls in Moscow and other cities were situated in pre-revolutionary buildings that did not fulfill the modern demands of fashion demonstrations. In many Soviet cities and towns fashion shows were organized in sports and concert halls as well as bigger theaters. The hall at VIALegprom was certainly one of the biggest in the world. It hardly ever stayed empty: in addition to its internal use, twice every month a regional house of fashion design visited it to demonstrate its own fashion collection at the Soviet capital. These fashion shows were, as a rule, open to ordinary Soviet citizens and foreign visitors.
In its hall of product assortment, VIALegprom started to exhibit the best Soviet clothes, shoes, and textiles which its aesthetic committee had inspected and approved. It had a unique historical collection of the different kinds of textiles produced in Russia and the USSR since pre-revolutionary times. The building also housed a library which was, after ODMO’s, the second fashion library in the Soviet Union with a rich collection of international and domestic fashion journals and other publications.243
It was above all VIALegprom which was responsible for the image of Soviet fashion abroad. The Institute created experimental designs of clothing aimed at international exhibitions and also collected and reproduced for the shows the best clothes created in the other houses of fashion design in the country. It organized delegations and compiled collections of Soviet fashion for the annual forums of fashion of the Socialist countries as well as for the more prestigious exhibitions in the West.
The only aesthetic council which had All-Union status and authority comprising the whole territory of the USSR on the questions of fashion and the culture of dress worked under the auspices of VIALegprom making it in practice the “lawgiver” of Soviet fashion. VIALegprom produced, and its aesthetic council gathered, inspected and approved of the trend-setting collection and worked out recommendations regarding the future perspectives of fashion.244 In the beginning this took place once a year, later on twice. As a result of its meetings and the work of the aesthetic council, VIALegprom regularly published a catalogue of fashion designs. Since fashion was planned at least a year ahead the fashion trends of 1970, for instance, were made in the summer of 1968 and were nally approved in the autumn of the same year.
The meetings of the aesthetic council were quite remarkable occasions, gathering together the leading fashion specialists of the country, including designers, pattern makers, art theorists, engineers, and the leaders of the various fashion organizations from all the republics and regions of the USSR. At best well over 500 participants could be present at the demonstration hall. The idea was that all fashion organizations would regularly send their best designs which included some innovative ideas to the aesthetic council to be seriously discussed and evaluated.
In practice, the aesthetic council went through and approved of four trend-setting collections every year: First, the prospective collection of textiles, clothes and other materials, second the knitwear items, then shoes and other leather items (bags, gloves, belts, etc.), and finally the collection of the complete sets of clothes. This order had a logic of its own since, quite naturally, each design needed its own raw materials. Interestingly, the idea of designing a complete set of clothes included hosiery, socks and accessories for both women and men.
All the houses of fashion design as well as, from the late 1970s onward, the main industrial enterprises made their own suggestions for the main collection.245 VIALegprom itself made only a few of the actual fashion designs; the other part came from the items designed by other houses and accepted into the special trend-setting collections. These included indoor and outdoor wear, knitwear as well as assorted leather and fur items.
Before each meeting of the big aesthetic council the members of its working group went through hundreds of designs submitted to them from the local organizations all over the country. A small number were turned down totally, the rest were divided into two groups to be included in either the industrial collection or the trend-setting collection. The final selection took place before the meeting of the whole aesthetic council.246 For instance, on the eve of the meeting of the aesthetic council on 22–23 November, 1968 its working section went through 403 new designs of male and female clothes, 50 knitwear items, 43 shoe designs, and 33 bags, suitcases and briefcases. Their designers came from the houses of fashion design all over the country. This particular meeting was quite typical and did not differ in any way from other meetings of these times.
The meetings of the council of VIALegprom differed from the meetings of the other fashion organizations since the collections were not the results of the work of the designers of one organization alone but represented the best designers in the whole country. The clothes in the industrial collection were recommended for taking into industrial production immediately (in this case as early as the second half of the year 1969). The designs of the trend-setting collection were in their turn meant to be included in the following industrial collection of 1970. In principle every directive collection was meant to become an industrial collection the year after. The purpose was to promote orderliness and forecasting. The biggest part of the collection inspected and evaluated by the working section of the aesthetic council was included in the trend-setting collection: 151 designs of men’s and women’s clothes, 33 designs of shoes, and 22 designs of leather products.247 Accessories, which were usually regarded as secondary complements to the main design, were considered to be integral parts of the whole outfit in these collections. The results of VIALegprom’s aesthetic council were published every year in special brochures, like “The directives of fashion of the complete set of clothes for the year …” or “The directives of the fashion show for the year …” They were then distributed all over the country.
The concluding part of the annual report on the collections of the aesthetic council was called the ensemble. In 1970 it gave the following characterization of future Soviet fashion: “The ensemble of female clothes distinguishes itself with its outstanding lines, harmonic portions, elegant forms … The male ensemble distinguishes itself with the clear silhouette of its items with their carefully worked out details and additions.”248
Together with the other socialist countries, the Soviet Union regularly demonstrated its new designs in the meetings of the Permanent Working Group on the Questions of the Culture of Dress of the COMECON. VIALegprom played an important role in this socialist competition too. Several dozen best female and male designs from the trend-setting collections of VIALegprom were selected for these demonstrations each year. They competed for the best designs with the fashion collections of the other European socialist countries.
Fashion Design in the Garment Enterprises
In 1962, A. A. Krasovskaya, the director of the Leningrad garment factory Bolshevichka, which specialized in the production of high quality women’s clothes published the book Sovetskim zhenshchinam-krasivuyu, dobrotnuyu odezhdu (To the Soviet women-beautiful and good clothes). Krasovskaya complained that her advanced enterprise, which had had an experimental laboratory of fashion design of its own since the 1930s, had to rely on the products of the Leningrad House of Fashion Design. In her words, in 1961 out of all the 200 new designs, 165 were ordered from this House and the factory’s own designers created only 35. In their own opinion, they could easily have done much more. She recommended that the proportion should be reversed and referred to the experiences of Hungary, which she had recently visited. The Hungarians created their new designs mostly in the industrial enterprises. The local houses of fashion design consulted the firms on the more general directions of fashion. In Hungary, the houses functioned, in other words, exclusively as trend-setters resembling the role of VIALegprom in the USSR.249 Krasovskaya was convinced that such a division of labor would be optimal for the garment industry in the Soviet Union too.250 Her opinion became popular among the factory directors, who were obviously dissatis ed with their dependence on the houses of fashion design and their curatorial role.
By 1960 at the latest all the major garment, shoe, knitwear, and leather factories had their own research and development departments or experimental laboratories and workshops. (Fig. 8.) They were directly engaged in both the design and styling and modeling of new patterns at the orders of the factory leadership as well as in the application-which often meant simpli cation-of the completed designs they received from the fashion houses, a procedure against which these houses constantly protested with hardly any results. The directors argued that many designs which came to them from the fashion houses, including ODMO, were good examples of Soviet haute couture in the sense that they were alien to “real life” and to the customers’ demands as well as to the technological possibilities and economic norms of the factories. Therefore it was necessary to modify them before taking them into production. To this claim the workers at the houses of the fashion design answered that, in fact, such changes often only led to the unnecessary simplification of the original design, mainly due to the professional incompetence of the garment factories.
The situation did not improve in the 1970s. The new economic politics demanded and actively promoted the formation of gigantic regional industrial consortiums by abolishing the central ministries and joining together several factories. As a consequence, their design organizations were joined together as well. As a result these organizations became stronger and could seriously compete with the real houses of fashion design. Some such conglomerates even established their own artistic councils which started to approve, on their own initiative, new designs worked out by the specialists of the factory. The very fact of the establishment of artistic councils was equal to a declaration of independence from the design houses in the questions of fashion. The design houses naturally protested against such tendencies.
Just like other big enterprises, the huge Moscow-based industrial garment conglomerate, with the characteristic name Zenskaya moda (Female Fashion) also had an experimental laboratory. It had come into being in the beginning of the 1970s as a result of the unification of three garment factories producing women’s fashion in the capital region, the profiles of which were quite close to each other: Moksvichka, Chaika and Istrinskaya shveinaya fabrika. Zhenskaya moda had its own artistic council. The following fact gives a good idea of the relatively high quality of its designs: four ended up at once in the trend-setting collection of the USSR for the years 1973–1974 and were demonstrated in the annual fashion competition of the socialist countries in Romania.
However, the new designs mainly came to the factory Zhenskaya moda from ODMO. Its own designers made only a relatively small percentage of them-as a rule only ten to fifteen percent. The situation in the whole country was about the same from the 1960s to the 1980s. The designers working at the factories had the advantage of being more operational: in the fashion houses it could take a year to provide the new design with the complete technical documentation starting from its first sketch. The factories could complete the same task in just a couple of months. Sometimes, with an urgent order from the leadership, the designers at the factory could manage to do it in a couple of days. (For instance, when the trade organizations demanded an urgent modification of an already existing design.) The other side of the coin was the almost total dependence of the designers on the factory leadership, who often oriented themselves more according to the practical demands of the fulfillment of the quota than to higher aesthetic imperatives. In addition, the majority of these research and development laboratories were, after all, professionally weaker than the “real” houses of fashion design. Taking into consideration all these factors the leaders of the Ministry of Light Industry did not want to make any cardinal changes in the relations of the various design organizations: they relied mostly on the higher professional capacity of the fashion design houses and expected better results from their cooperation with the factories.
Fashion Design in the Houses of Everyday Services
In the 1960s a unique new sector of the economy came into being in the Soviet Union, even the name of which is almost impossible to translate into any other language. This was the comprehensive system of everyday services (sluzhba byta) for the population with a special ministry of its own. The Ministry of Everyday Services of the Population of the RSFSR (Minbyt RSFSR) was a Republican Ministry founded in 1965 to administer all enterprises relating to everyday services on the territory of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It was shut down in 1991 following the collapse of the Soviet Union. In contrast to both light industry and trade, there was no All-Union Ministry in the field of Everyday Services. It was thought that the Republican level was more appropriate to administer numerous local and regional service enterprises.
Services were for a long time regarded to be the less developed part of the Soviet economy. Until the mid-1960s, many service enterprises and units (barber’s and hair-dresser’s, laundries, ateliers and workshops, watchmaker’s, shoe and tool repair shops, etc.) worked under the local or municipal administration, others were cooperatives, whereas yet others were scattered under various other ministries and administrative units. In 1965, after the establishment of the new Ministry, they were all united into one central administrative system. In fact, a totally new field of the economy was thus born in the Soviet Union. The purpose of this reform was to enlarge the network of services, and provide them with modern tools and technique as well as more qualified labor force. The new Ministry introduced new quality standards to raise the level of its services. It also soon established its own institutes of fashion design to serve its ateliers of custom made clothes. In the following we shall present the most important among them.
Contrary to the capitalist West where local shopping centers often combined enterprises of trade with various service units under the same roof, in the USSR the state-owned trade and services had been, following the principle of specialization, strictly separated into separate ministries as well as buildings. The new Soviet service centers, Doma byta, on the other hand, covered everything that had to do with the services needed for the everyday life of a human being. They united all the existing ateliers of custom made clothes which had earlier belonged to different administrative departments, together with barber’s shops and public bathing institutions, dry cleaners, renting points, as well as various service centers for the repair of watches, metal objects, electric tools, and so on.251
The system of individual sewing or custom made clothes consisted of four divisions in the USSR: 1) clothes and suits, 2) knitwear, 3) head wear, and 4) shoes. Even though they all belonged to the same ministry they all also had their own ateliers, factories, and industrial conglomerates with their own designers. The individual sewing of hats and shoes in particular was popular in the Soviet Union. Special regional industrial conglomerates were established in hat production which had their own experimental shops with a staff of designers.252
The general idea was that the units of individual sewing and services could compensate for the shortcomings of the mass production of clothes, hats and shoes in the Soviet consumer goods industry. At the same time, in the economically advanced countries of the West such ateliers of individual orders and service had become rare and expensive luxuries. The opening of a nationwide chain of these service centers was concrete proof that highly centralized industrial mass production, officially favored by the Soviet government, was not a universally valid solution to all the problems of the satisfaction of the population’s needs and material well-being. At the same time, the principle “big is beautiful” came from the very beginning to dominate this new service sector of the Soviet economy too. The new service centers were large and centralized all the various activities and units under the same roof and the same administrative planning system.
Since the individual nature of the customized production of clothes could not in general compete cost-effectively with mass production the government fixed its prices at an artificially low level. Therefore dressmakers’ and tailors’ ateliers sold their garments for relatively low prices, though they were still more expensive than ready-made clothes.253 Sometimes custom garments could, however, be even cheaper than ready made. The authorities therefore took to the old proven methods and tried to make the ateliers of individualized sewing more profitable by promoting their specialization, centralizing their production, and introducing more effective methods of mass production such as the conveyor belt with a strict division of labor. Thus the system of individual services gradually repeated the very same methods that had produced so many controversial results in Soviet light industry and had originally given rise to this new alternative organization. Its working methods often came to be closer to industrial production when compared to the traditional fashion ateliers and tailoring workshops. The industrialized production units of custom made clothes thus faced contradictory expectations from the very beginning, which were understandably not at all easy to satisfy. They were expected to have a highly individual approach to their clients at the same time as being economically highly effective by making use of all the methods of standardized industrial mass production.
The Soviet ateliers made practically any kind of clothing to order – for newborn babies and adolescents, for women and men, for civilians and officers. In principle one could easily order a tailcoat or a tuxedo even though their prices would admittedly be out of reach of most wage earners. Consequently, they were for sale only in the ateliers belonging to the highest luxury or first class, operating only in the bigger cities. People with normal figures mostly ordered clothes that they could wear for a longer time and not just one or two seasons from the ateliers, like overcoats, suits, dresses, more festive clothes or simply more fashionable clothes that they could not find in the shops. However, it was also quite possible to let an atelier sew new – or repair or remake old-underwear for oneself. Those who did not have time to queue for a good tailor or dressmaker could make use of the semi-industrial items that the ateliers recommended to their customers; these were produced in small series at the factories of the system of custom made clothes. In such cases clothes could be fitted to the client almost at once and no particular fitting session was needed. The sale of semi-industrial clothes was much more profitable for the ateliers than only sewing to individual order. However, they also raised from time to time critical questions among the specialists. They did not, after all, quite correspond to the idea of a real atelier, with its individually custom-made clothing and skillful, experienced tailors or dressmakers.
A great part of the income of the ateliers in this new system of administration was expected to come from the unofficial market, dominated until then by private tailors and dressmakers who worked illegally and did not pay any taxes, thus depriving the state every year of remarkable sums of money. According to a financial inquiry from the year 1966, private persons had made 20 to 30 percent of all items of the outer appearance of the Soviet citizens.254 These private and illegal or semi-legal services continued, however, to compete quite successfully with the official state-owned new services until the very end of the Soviet Union, thus disappointing those who had put great hopes in the new centralized system.
In the mid-1960s, during the formative years of the state system of individual sewing, or custom made clothes, about 12,000 ateliers with about 35,000 pattern makers worked under the Ministry of Everyday Services of the Russian Federation alone.255 Since the qualifications of the workforce were rather poor only a few pattern makers mastered the skills necessary for successful and creative fashion design. The first inspections in their localities showed indeed that the pattern makers often could not follow fashion. Many sewed clothes for their customers using old patterns and silhouettes they had learned long ago. This gave rise to plans of organizing separate units of fashion design within the field of everyday services, of raising the qualifications and educating new cadres of designers and pattern makers, of publishing and distributing fashion journals and albums and of adding more precise drawings and instructions to designs.
The establishment of the network of educational, scientific and design institutions of the Ministry of Everyday Services started in the 1960s too. The Moscow Technological Institute became the main provider of its new cadres. It educated designers, pattern makers and engineers of clothing for this department in particular. In 1967 two more similar institutes of higher learning were opened, one in Ukraine (Khmel’nitskii) and the other in the Far East (Vladivostok) under the respective republican ministries of everyday services. A wide range of courses for the improvement of professional qualifications were also organized.256
Some exemplary enterprises existed in the Ministry of Everyday Services too. In Yaroslavl’, the firm Volga came into being as a result of the unification of all the local enterprises of garment sewing in the autumn of 1964. In 1966 it was turned into a bigger industrial conglomerate with the same name. It united firms from both Yaroslavl’ and Rybinsk and had a research and development bureau with its own fashion designers. The following year, 1967, the construction of a whole separate building for a fashion house under the Ministry of Everyday Services started in the city of Yaroslavl’ in order to provide new designs to the local ateliers and enterprises.257
In the same way, four production units of everyday services were united in the city of Perm into the new Perm Garment Factory of Individual Sewing No. 1. It combined 33 ateliers in the different regions of the city with a total staff of 2,250 people.258 The factory had an experimental workshop with its own fashion designers and its own artistic council. In 1968 it had 13 members, all from the factory: designers, the head engineer, pattern designers and pattern makers, and others. The new designs that passed the judgement of its artistic council were sent to the experimental workshop to be properly worked out, after which they were offered to clients through the network of its own ateliers. During its first year of existence (1967) the Perm Factory No. 1 adopted over 100 new designs which it offered to the inhabitants of Perm.259 The factory actively advertised its products and services among the local population too. In the end of the 1960s, it organized fashion shows of its new designs twice a week in two places in the city: in the local Center of Everyday Services, Almaz and in the smaller demonstration hall of the biggest atelier in the city, Elegant. In 1968 the research and development workshop of the factory did not yet have any models in its staff. Therefore, the models from its local competitor, the Perm House of Fashion Design under the Ministry of Light Industry worked there on short term contracts.
The whole USSR was rumored to visit the Tallinn atelier of individual sewing, Lembitu, which actively engaged in fashion design and was one of the first ateliers to organize its own department of semi-manufactured products. These could be fitted and modified according to the needs of the client on the very day of taking the order, which was extremely rare in Soviet days.
The availability of the services of tailors and dressmakers of individual sewing differed greatly from one region of the Soviet Union to another. As a rule it was much better in the cities than in the countryside. The citizens of Moscow and Leningrad had by far the best services at their disposal. At the moment of the fall of the Soviet Union, Moscow had about 800 ateliers attached to the larger factories in the city districts as well as a dozen industrial units specialized in making clothes following the Muscovites’ orders: fur clothes (Zima, 42 ateliers), women’s underwear (Gratsia, 26 ateliers), plus-sized clothes (Elegant, 9 ateliers), children’s and youth wear (Yunost’, 31 ateliers), head wear (21 ateliers) as well as knitwear (Trikotazhnitsa, 13 ateliers).260 All these conglomerates had their own designers. In addition, the capital city had almost as many ateliers belonging to different departmental units which serviced only their own, restricted clientele: the Communist Party apparatus, the KGB oddicers, the personnel of the Ministry of International Affairs and other ministries, the Academy of Sciences, and so on.
The early official statistics are quite impressive. In 1965 the clothing ateliers of the republican Ministries of Everyday Services (shoe makers’ ateliers and head wear not included) filled 30 million sewing or repairing orders from the Soviet population.261 This was the time when the system was first under construction. After another 15 years, in 1980, in the Russian Federation alone, the clothes, knitwear and shoe makers filled 113 million orders.262 The figures for Moscow were particularly high. According to one of the leaders of the Moscow Administration of Individual Sewing, N. A. Nesterova, the Moscow ateliers filled about 5 million orders a year in the 1980s.263 This added up to almost the total amount of the population in the capital city. The ateliers at Moscow were also as a rule of good quality and accordingly the quality of sewing was also better. The long queues at the ateliers in Moscow witnessed to the fact that they preserved their popularity among the Soviet population.
The Baltic Republics were also privileged in this respect. The Riga conglomerate Rigas Modes (3,500 workers) had four industrial units with ten departments (among them, as usual, clothes, knitwear, fur and head wear), 85 ateliers and workshops. If we compare the amount of orders which this conglomerate, working exclusively in Riga, fulfilled with the amount of the population of the city, every third citizen on average ordered a garment annually from their ateliers and every sixth from the knitwear atelier. Rigas Modes had a big research and development department where the designers constructed hundreds of new designs of fashionable clothes for their clients every year.264 The same was true of the shoe conglomerate at Riga, Rigas Apavi, which was famous for its designers.265
The city of Kaunas in Lithuania also had quite impressive statistics to show. At the turn of the 1980s the local factory of individual sewing of clothes Mada (1,400 workers) had 30 workshops and ateliers as well as an experimental design workshop. Its designers constructed and recommended to their clients each season 25–30 new clothing designs. In 1979, Mada filled about 600,000 orders a year. Compared to the population of Kaunas this meant that on average every person in Kaunas visited the ateliers of individual sewing with a new order almost twice a year.266
The situation was totally different in the sparsely populated agrarian regions of the country, in Siberia, the Far East, and the European North where it was not profitable to construct big new buildings for the ateliers of individual sewing. One attempt to solve this problem was the introduction of mobile ateliers built in trucks, the production of which started in the middle of the 1960s in the factory at the city of Ordzhonikidze. When the car body was raised higher on both axels it became an all-terrain vehicle which could drive on tracks with no real roads. This pride of the spirit of Soviet engineering became one of the main attractions at the International Exhibition of Fashion in Moscow in 1967. It had both air conditioning and heating in the working cabin. Inside the cabin was a mini-atelier: a table and chair for sewing and a box for the clothes, clothing hangers with semi-manufactured clothes, a mirror, an armchair and a small table with fashion journals for the clients. Whenever the mobile atelier came to a village the loudspeakers announced to the inhabitants the following information, which had been recorded in advance: what was for sale, how long sewing would take, and the prices of the orders. The service of the clients, the consultation with the pattern maker, the reading of the fashion journals and taking of the measures went on with accompanying music.267 In some parts of the Soviet Union these trucks were known as the “atelier on wheels.”268
The Soviet authorities divided the ateliers into four quality classes: highest or luxury, first and second class and “ordinary” sewing workshops. Some ateliers of the highest and first class were officially called fashion ateliers. They had their own designers who consulted the clients on the selection of raw materials, design and style of the clothes. If the client so wished the designer was expected to draw a sketch of the ordered design.
In 1966 special ateliers for girls and boys under the age of 18 were opened in the cities. Since the prices fixed by the state were much lower than in the ateliers for adults these children’s ateliers became quite popular. By 1980, Moscow alone had 30 such children’s ateliers belonging to the firm Yunost’ which turned out 80 to 90 new children’s designs each year.269 One of the tasks facing the workers in these ateliers was the propagation of fashion and good taste among the youth. “The children should be taught to dress themselves well just as they are taught other qualities of adequate behavior and good manners without which it is impossible to imagine any harmoniously grown up human being,” the Journal of the Russian Ministry of Everyday Services, Sluzhba byta announced to its readers in 1967.270
This monthly professional journal started publishing in 1963. Its huge editions (for instance, 1.55 million in 1966), the popular character of its articles and the abundance of its entertaining material soon turned it into a popular journal which had a wide impact on the opinions of the population. This journal gave, up to the mid-1970s, a quite realistic picture of the situation in its own field, including both critique and discussion of its shortcomings. It devoted a lot of space to the questions of fashion and the culture of dress on its pages. As the editors wrote in 1967 “by publishing the designs of the clothes, shoes, hats and accessories we not only make our readers familiar with what is beautiful, practical and fashionable, but even give more concrete recommendations to the workers of the everyday services in the country.”271
The journal regularly published clients’ complaints as well as critical views of the experts. These writings show clearly that the struggle to make the ateliers of custom made clothes economically more profitable was in fact almost lost. One article described how a person living in Irkutsk, Siberia had wanted to order a suit from the local atelier but his request was turned down without any explanation. The costume was made only after he had complained to higher authorities. In another case, the atelier took four years to sew a dress, totally destroying it in the process. The inspections of the ateliers revealed constant overstepping the deadlines of the orders, bureaucratic treatment of the customers, client complaints, etc. In some cases public attorneys had to take measures in order to make the ateliers comply with their rules and regulations.272 It was no wonder that many clients, after such unhappy experiences with a state atelier, turned to the services of private tailors and dressmakers, which continued to operate in great numbers alongside the official state system of custom made clothes. E. Furman’s column published in the journal Sluzhba byta in 1980 was characteristic. Furman recollected that in one case when a tailor had botched an order of trousers he-knowing that the client also worked in an atelier – recommended the client not to visit his state – owned atelier anymore but rather order his trousers from a good private tailor, even giving him the right address.273
Fashion Designers in the Factories of Everyday Services
The design of new clothes for the needs of the custom made system followed the general tendencies of Soviet fashion in all essentials. The demand of the consumers was proclaimed as one of the priorities. In order to adequately provision all the sewing and knitwear units, as well as the shoemakers and the hatters, thousands of new professionally designed items were needed each year. For instance, in 1965 450 tailors and seamstresses who had worked at the Leningrad Trust of Individual Sewing presented their own designs to the artistic council of the factory. In the lack of any specialized design organizations, by that time this activity had become more common and the best designs received prizes.274 Therefore, the Ministry of Everyday Services soon felt obliged to open its own institutes of fashion design and pattern making. In so doing it relied heavily on the previous experience of the Ministry of Light Industry. In practice, however, the task in this case proved to be even more complicated. It was not enough just to open specialized fashion design units; individual experienced designers and pattern makers also had to be recruited for these ateliers.
In the system of individual sewing in general, the design workshops and experimental departments of the factories and industrial conglomerates were mainly responsible for the design of clothes. They made their designs in response to the needs of the ateliers belonging to their own administrative organizations. As early as the mid-1970s all the bigger factories within the system of individual sewing in fact actively engaged in fashion design. The republican ministries of everyday services were naturally interested in propagating their own fashion, which was expected to compete successfully with the fashion of the consumer goods industry. Therefore they started publishing their patterns on a large scale. The album Mody 1967 (Fashions 1967, with an edition of 75,000) is a good example. It presented the designs of the Kiev Factory No. 2. Alongside the name of each design its author was also mentioned.
In the 1970s, the ateliers in the agrarian regions opened experimental workshops with their own staffs of designers. For instance, the Kolomenskaya inter-regional factory of individual sewing in the Moscow region with 1,200 workers united 18 ateliers in the Kolomna, Lukhovitsy, Zaraisk and Ozersk districts of the south-eastern parts of Moscow region in the beginning of the 1980s. The needs of the peasant population, their main clients, dominated their designs. It is interesting that just like their colleagues in Light Industry, the designers for the system of individual sewing were, in addition to their main professional responsibilities, eager to act as messengers of good taste to the population. The experts at the Kolomenskaya factory traveled regularly in the villages answering questions concerning modern fashion. This was felt to be necessary since the peasants “do not have any possibilities to follow the fashion journals.”275
The next step in the system of individual sewing was establishing specialized fashion houses in the bigger cities – in the republican capitals and the industrial centers. The first fashion house of this kind in the USSR was opened in 1966 in Ordzhonikidze (North Ossetia). The name “fashion house” sounded more serious, modern and attractive than an atelier of individual sewing or custom made clothes. It was thought that the services of a fashion house would be both multifaceted and better quality. These houses were regarded as centers of cultured leisure for the population, and the bigger cities generally had several such houses. Some of them were also attached directly to the bigger factories, such as the Moscow factories no. 15 and 19.
As a rule, these fashion houses grew out of the best local ateliers and they continued to work mostly on their old premises or, in the best cases, in new, specially constructed buildings. What a typical, exemplary fashion house looked like can be judged on the basis of the Fashion House of Leningrad. Its new building was finished at the end of the 1960s. It was located downtown on the Kirov Prospect. The service bureau, the information desk and the café were located on the ground floor of this building, which had six floors. The atelier itself was placed on the second through fourth floors. These floors also had room for the sales of ready-made and semi-fabricated clothes, exhibition halls, and the demonstration hall with 350 seats and a podium for the models. The fourth floor was dedicated to the production units engaged in individual sewing and the fitting of semi-manufactured clothes. The seamstresses, tailors, fitters and designers worked there. The administration occupied the fifth floor.276 e client could thus, in one place, get acquainted with the latest fashion, order a fashionable dress from the atelier or choose one from among the semi-fabricated clothes, and spend the rest of his or her time either in the café or watching the fashion show in the demonstration hall. Moscow had a few such fashion houses on Arbat Street and on the Prospekt Mira among others. The latter was opened in June 1982. The famous Soviet designer Vyacheslav Zaitsev became its first artistic director.277 He had long experience with ODMO but since 1978 he had worked at the fashion system of the Russian Ministry of Everyday Services.
The Moscow Fashion House (Dom mody) on the Prospekt Mira, housed in a building with 9 floors, was the biggest institution of its kind in the Soviet Union. It was a huge enterprise with 1,500 employees and united the functions of a design organization, an atelier of custom-made clothes, a garment factory and a boutique of its own on the ground floor. It was the first Soviet fashion organization officially allowed to sell its products in small series. This took place however first under Gorbachev’s perestroika in the second half of the 1980s. The demonstration hall occupied its first floor and had twice weekly theatrical shows lasting one and a half hours each. Its own artistic councils approved of all its new designs of men’s and women’s clothes.
Special Units of Fashion Design for Centers of Everyday Services
In addition to the fashion houses, the regional administrations of the Ministries of Everyday Services started to establish their own specialized centers of fashion design in all the republics and bigger cities of the USSR. These were not part of a factory or fashion atelier. After 1960 they became important institutes in their own field. Their functions were otherwise quite similar to those of the houses of fashion design under the Ministry of Light Industry – like ODMO – copying their systems in many essentials. They designed all four kinds of clothes that could be ordered at the ateliers of individual sewing: sewn clothing, knitwear, shoes and head wear. Just like the other houses of fashion design in the consumer goods industry they mainly served the enterprises belonging to the same administrative structures in their own region: ateliers, factories, industrial conglomerates and fashion ateliers of the houses of everyday services. They worked out new designs with the whole package of technical documentation and patterns. Enterprises were expected to regularly order new designs from their own regional centers of fashion design. At the same time they tended increasingly to design and were eager to promote their own clothes in their experimental departments. These new clothing patterns were then recommended to clients through the comprehensive network of ateliers, fashion houses and other units of the Ministry. Following these designs, the factories of individual sewing also produced small series of apparel. They did not, however, have the right to sell their own products directly to their customers. Even in this sense their position followed the common rules in the system of the consumer goods industry.
The centers of fashion design soon established artistic councils. They also had a staff of their own models and a demonstration hall for their fashion shows. Each season they prepared both industrial and trend setting, haute couture collections. Following the example of the consumer goods industry they engaged in research: they distributed the most advanced foreign and domestic experience in the field of individual sewing, analyzed fashion trends, and engaged in methodical work with the designers of the fashion houses and the design shops at their affiliated factories. Gradually, the best houses of the Ministry of Everyday Services started demonstrating their collections abroad, predominantly in the socialist countries.
They had the same kind of responsibility as other fashion organizations to propagate fashion and the culture of dress among the population. Their workers regularly appeared in the mass media, organized exhibitions and fashion shows and published albums, booklets and drawings of designs, which were recommended to clients and distributed through the ateliers. The editions of the albums were mostly between 50,000 and 100,000 copies.
The Moscow Center of Fashion Design was one of the first within this structure. It was opened in the end of 1962. In the middle of the 1980s it had a staff of about 350, 20 designers and as many pattern makers among them. It employed 2–3 male models and about 15 female models of various ages and figures on a regular basis.278 (Fig. 9.)
A typical center of fashion design consisted of departments of both designers and pattern makers, one production department, and one technical department which engaged in the development and adaptation of technology for the purposes of individual sewing. It also had a publishing unit, including photograph services, the department of pattern drawing, and a workshop which produced prototypes of the clothes. In order not to lose its contacts with its previous customers, the Moscow Center of Fashion Design preserved its own experimental atelier.
The Law Giver of Fashion for the Service Centers: The Experimental Center of Clothing Design, TsOTShL
In addition to the regional centers of fashion design, from the 1960s onwards the system of the Russian Ministry of Everyday Services, alongside the other republics, established their own specialized experimental workshops. For instance, the laboratory of head wear and corsets in the city of Rostov-na-Donu was very important.279 It became the leading house of design for corsets in the Soviet Union. In addition to designing new models, the laboratory – in a way already familiar from other fashion design units – propagated its activities through mass media, educated professionals in its own field, organized seminars, and gave out illustrated albums and catalogues of its designs, which were then sent, together with the necessary technical instructions, to the enterprises of individual sewing.280
It is a well-known fact that any dress fits nicely with the underwear that has been sewn for the particular figure. Therefore even their form should follow the fashionable lines and silhouette of the dress. However, even if the dresses were, as a rule, quite fashionable every atelier had its own way of making their products of haberdashery. It must be admitted that the results are not always good. The reason for this is that little attention is paid in general to this important field of design.281
This is how T. Pluzhnikova, the director of the Rostov laboratory, characterized the situation to the readers of the journal Sluzhba byta while presenting new designs of women’s underwear. In 1980, the designers at Rostov created about 250 hat designs and as many designs of women’s underwear every year (with the adjoining technical documentation), which were then distributed to the various organizations of individual sewing in all the regions in the Russian part of the country.282 The Rostov experimental center published illustrated fashion albums with its own designs. For instance, in 1966 an album of the designs of women’s underwear appeared.283
At the head of the whole Russian republican system of fashion design of individual sewing, amounting at the moment of its foundation in the 1960s to well over 70 design organizations,284 stood the Experimental Center (TsOtShL) in Moscow. Its predecessor was a laboratory under the Moscow city administration. It was founded at the end of the 1950s and it had rich practical experience in the design of various kinds of clothes for the ateliers of custom made clothes in the capital, from formal to everyday clothes, men’s, women’s and children’s fashion. As early as 1957 it published its own design albums and booklets in large editions.
The new Experimental Center inherited all these activities together with new additional functions. Its tasks resembled those which VIALegprom and ODMO had in relation to industrial mass production of clothes. In other words, it was not only the main design and pattern making organization in its own administrative department but also the department’s scientific-methodical center. The fact that the Experimental Center, just like VIALegprom, studied the fashion trends, consulted fashion ateliers, and created its own directive collection each season emphasized this close parallelism. The journal Sluzhba byta thus called it the “the law giver of fashion of its kind” with good reason in 1967. The title of the article, dedicated to its designs, proudly called the Center “the designer of the Republic.”285
In the 1960s the specialists at the Experimental Center established contacts with VIALegprom and ODMO. The designs from the Experimental Center, together with the designs from the leading houses of fashion design under the Ministry of Light Industry, became part of the general trend-setting collection of the USSR. From the mid-1960s, its designs also appeared in the design catalogues that VIALegprom recommended to the garment factories in its annual consultations. For instance, the fashion catalogue Modnaya odezhda286 included 110 designs from the Center.
Beginning in 1967, the Experimental Center started to organize its own annual consultations among the specialists of the Ministry of Everyday Services of the Russian Federation. They analyzed the results and experiences of the previous year and discussed the special problems of clothing design for the organizations of individual sewing. In addition, the laboratory organized regional consultations, exhibitions and other events and started to publish fashion albums and illustrated brochures about fashion trends. (Fig. 10.)
Among its publications, the journal-catalogue Modeli sezona (Seasonal fashions, 3–4 issues a year) had a special position. It was distributed to all Soviet enterprises of individual sewing. In 1968 it published, alongside the designs of the Experimental Center, the best creations from the regional design organizations of everyday services. The employees of the Center – just like those of other fashion organizations – conducted a great deal of propagandistic work, writing articles about fashion and the culture of dress for the popular Soviet journals and newspapers. Their credo coincided on the whole with the point of view generally adopted among the Soviet fashion specialists: the main focuses in fashion were rationality, functionality and moderation.
The TsOTShL organized republican consultations on fashion twice a year. Besides the exchange of experiences they served the development of a unified “political line” in the tendencies of fashion as well as a unified approach towards the technical design of clothes. To take an example, the four-day meeting at Kalinin in 1970 had about two thousand participants. The journal Sluzhba byta wrote a detailed report of it including pictures from the new directive collection of fashion for the year 1971.287
These consultations followed more or less the same scheme and program as the All-Union and All-Russian meetings organized both by VIALegprom and ODMO for their designers in the consumer goods industry. In the beginning the directors of the Experimental Center delivered lectures on the tendencies of modern fashion, and on the present state and the most advanced methods of sewing. They also took up actual problems in the field. After that the representatives of the regional fashion units reported on their work by demonstrating their best designs and even whole collections with live models. These demonstrations had several purposes: they were a kind of annual report, an exchange of experiences as well as an introduction to the principal discussions. In the end, the best designs from the various collections were suggested for inclusion in the general All-Russian directive collection.
During the second and third days of the meeting its participants were divided into different sections according to their professional specialization. These sections discussed the questions of design, construction and the technology of the production of clothes. The last, fourth day was dedicated to the drawing of conclusions as well as the demonstration of designs-both from the trend-setting collections selected by the artistic council and other collections. For instance, the city of Kalinin (Tver’) in 1970 had a demonstration of a special collection for full-figured women as well as a collection of the hundred best head wear and women’s underwear designs that the above mentioned Rostov laboratory had created. They were included as an additional part of the annual trend-setting collection for the year 1971. This was the first time that a special collection of designs was created in the USSR for heavier women. Their sewing was considered to better suit the ateliers of individual sewing than industrial mass production, which oriented its designs to the average female figures.
The trend-setting collection, which included all kinds of clothes for all the seasons, was particularly important since the workers in the system of individual sewing were expected to mainly follow them, their style, length, color scale, etc., in their work. In the meeting on the last day the most advanced enterprises received their awards. The best designers, pattern makers and tailors were also rewarded for their outstanding performance.288
The trends of modern fashion were often discussed quite heatedly in these annual meetings. In particular, the meeting at Kalinin in 1970 raised the question of the adequacy and decency of female trousers-a question which had been hotly debated in the Soviet press around the same time. The directors of the Experimental Center strongly encouraged the design of female trousers and even fashionable combinations like female overcoats with fitting trousers.289
The main stages a design had to pass through on its way to the customer were the following: first, a prototype was sewn following a draft drawn by the designer. Then a model demonstrated it to the artistic council. After it had been approved of, a couple more months were needed to draw the final design pattern, print it, and send the catalogues and price lists to the local offices. Then the local administrations, industrial conglomerates and factories of individual sewing inspected them and selected the designs they liked best, after which they ordered them from the Experimental Center. After that, it prepared the necessary technical documentation of the designs asked for and received the proper payment for them. After another half a year, the technical documents and patterns would be finished and were mailed from Moscow to the local administration which had ordered them. It could then multiply the documents and distribute these to its own ateliers.290 At best, the clients of the ateliers could order clothes using these new designs nine to ten months after their original creation. In this time, fashion could change. This long road was, however, much faster than it was in the system of light industry.
The analogous design organizations which operated under the Ministries of Everyday Services in the other Soviet republics worked basically in the same way as the Russian organization, which was, however, the largest of them all.
Closer to the Customer: Fashion Design in the Organizations of the Ministry of Local Industry
The Ministry of Local Industry of the RSFSR was founded after the WW2, in 1946. It took the place of the old People’s Commissariat of Local Industry, established in 1934. It was reinvigorated in 1966 when the Soviet Government passed a new statute which stayed in place until the end of the Soviet Union. Its main purpose was to enlarge the assortment of ordinary consumer goods as well as to improve their quality. It also helped the enterprises of local industry to adapt the achievements of modern science and advanced technology. As a result, local industry started to modernize. Only small factories and workshops which made use of second-hand raw materials and left-overs from large scale industry, such as defects and cut-offs from textiles, or limited local resources fell under its administration. In addition, enterprises and workshops for arts and crafts, which relied on hand-made production and in which large scale production would have been practically impossible, belonged to local industry. They were mostly located in small towns or in the countryside. Local industry employed many disabled workers in special workshops as well as people working at home. It had its own fashion houses and units of fashion design which had rather specific tasks and profiles.
In the Soviet economy local industry (mestnaya promyshlennost’) always had only a helper’s role in relation to the consumer goods industry, which was mainly responsible for the production of the ready-made clothes in the country. As a rule, local industry traditionally engaged in the production of all kinds of souvenirs, toys, handmade goods, some types of knitwear and head wear, and ties, scarves, belts, buttons, pins, ribbons, as well as other such minor accessories of dress. The importance of all these accessories increased with the introduction of the principle of designing whole sets or ensembles of clothing in the 1960s. In the 1960s VIALegprom, ODMO, and the other leading design institutes started to pay more attention to the question of the details of dress, which had earlier been regarded as only of secondary importance. They increasingly recognized that fashion does not exist exclusively in the lines and colors of dress but also in the various details. Specialized designers of embroidery and textile printing were now employed in many general houses of fashion design. For instance, Viacheslav Zaitsev started his career at ODMO as a designer of “secondary features and accessories” for an ensemble of clothes. Accordingly, the success of the Soviet designer often depended on the achievements and shortcomings of the smaller enterprises and workshops of local industry, which did not officially enjoy a high status in the Soviet planned economy. In addition, the attempts to export Soviet consumer goods abroad opened the decision makers’ eyes to the fact that items with national or folk motifs were often the most successful ones in the West, particularly if they were hand made in limited numbers. For instance, the traditional decorations of the local manufacturers, like embroideries in gold or silver thread or collars with the well-known lacework from the Vologda region added another unique and exquisite flavor to the products of the garment industry.
In this respect it is understandable that the unique Scientific Research Institute of the Artistic Industry (NII Khudozhestvennoi promyshlennosti), or arts and crafts, which had been moved under the administration of the Russian Ministry of Local Industry, became much more active and important in the 1960s. One of its main tasks was the study and design of the traditional national or ethnic costumes. Starting in the 1950s it published the series Khudozhestvennye promysly RSFSR (Arts and Crafts in the Russian Federation). It conducted research on the regional specificities of Russian embroidery and published illustrated booklets about it.
In 1969 the institute had 29 specialists including designers and pattern makers. The laboratory designed embroideries, developed their technology and cooperated in this field with about 60 industrial enterprises in the USSR. The laboratory also studied and developed the production of batik, the artistic printing of silk, which only small local manufacturers and workshops had mastered earlier. Batik also became more popular in women’s clothes partly due to the parallel international boom in folk themes in fashion.291
Until the 1960s the Institute mainly designed items of dress produced as unique examples (for museums, folk culture collections, etc.) but in the beginning of the 1960s it faced the task of combining its narrow scientific occupation with the needs of mass production. An important stage in this process was the founding of the Laboratory of Artistic Clothing Design.292 In 1969 this laboratory had 15 designers and pattern makers on its payroll-mostly talented young people, recent graduates from the artistic centers of higher learning in Moscow. The laboratory paid attention above all to “the creation of unique costumes in modern style,” that is, it not only collected and preserved but also systematically studied and analyzed the technical peculiarities of the sewing and patterns of the various kinds of national or ethnic clothes, including their color scale, their fabrics, trimmings and knitting. The end result was the creation of new designs based on national or ethnic motifs from Russia and the other Soviet republics. The experimental patterns thus created were then recommended to the houses of fashion design under the Ministry of Light Industry, to the ateliers of individual sewing, and to the design shops of the various sewing enterprises. These ethnic clothes could inspire them to use ethnic motifs in their own designs which was officially encouraged by the Soviet authorities.
In the 1960s the Institute advanced from the design of individual items aimed mainly for exhibitions and museum collections to the sewing of whole ethnic collections of clothes following one or another general theme or idea. It organized its own design demonstrations too. It had its own artistic council, which consisted of representatives from the garment industry, art historians, and other specialists on the history of dress.293 In practice, their creations were produced and available to customers only in very limited numbers.
By the beginning of the 1970s all the republican ministries of local industry had their own research institutes. All these organizations had their own departments which engaged in the design of all kinds of consumer items, including clothing. In the 1980s, the Russian Ministry of Local Industry alone supervised 1380 industrial units and enterprises and 112 research workshops.294 In other words, local industry gradually created a huge system of fashion design and construction of its own. is was, in practice, the fourth extensive organization of fashion design in the Soviet Union.
The Differentiation of Soviet Economic Administration
The establishment of these four largely parallel Soviet fashion organizations, which took place in the three post-war decades, followed an interesting administrative logic. At the beginning only a few fashion design units were opened in Moscow and some other big urban centers. They rapidly spread their networks all over the country: their units increased in numbers and diversified their functions. Soon the planners detected that the development had led too long towards the decentralization and increasing autonomy of these numerous local enterprises. The next step was the strengthening of the planning and controlling mandate of the central administration either by founding a totally new central unit in Moscow or by giving more power to a previously existing one. These central units officially never planned or controlled the activities of their local fashion houses in detail. In practice their power was quite modest. It depended more on their recognized professional competence and better resources than on their position in the administrative hierarchy. Instead of dictating fashion to their underlings they acted more as positive examples and trend setters. Nevertheless, by regular training and sending their instructions to the thousands of designers and pattern makers working in their local units they had a firm grip on the formation of a Soviet style of fashion design. By publishing popular fashion journals and albums they also acted as the main propagators of Soviet fashion and the “educators of taste.” It was also generally acknowledged that they had the best experts on their payrolls.
Another interesting observation which has wider implications to the study of the development of the Soviet system of administration is the willingness or even eagerness with which the different Soviet ministries created their own, extensive organizations of fashion design with to a great extent overlapping functions. Every ministry which was somehow involved in the clothing of the Soviet population lobbied, judging from the results often quite successfully, for the need of their own independent fashion design organizations. Taking into account the centralized nature of the Soviet planned economy one would have expected much more coordination and reserve in this respect. It looks like no one really had a general overview of or controlled the development of the whole field of fashion design in the Soviet Union. One possible explanation is that these separate, partly overlapping administrative units effectively used the shortcomings of their competitors to promote their own issues. This was perhaps most obvious in the relations between the Ministry of Light Industry and the Ministry of Everyday Services. The extensive chain of the ateliers of custom made clothes was created both to combat the illegal market and to compensate for the shortcomings caused by the inflexibility and monotony of the industrial mass production of clothes. At the same time it worked under the same pressure of economic effectiveness and tried to solve its problems with the very same methods applied in industrial mass production, by standardizing its products and increasing production targets. Both sides complained that they were not allowed to produce small series and open their own experimental clothing shops or boutiques. This was a concrete demand that – despite intensive lobbying by all these parallel organizations – the Soviet government and the Communist Party never really approved of.
This is a good example of the power relations between the central governmental and party organizations and authorities, on the one hand, and the various fashion organizations, on the other hand. The Soviet fashion institutes worked constantly under some basic economic and administrative constraints and limitations which could occasionally be challenged, on purpose or by chance, but which all those concerned took mostly for granted. Within these limits the development and regulation of fashion was left to the numerous, increasingly well-educated fashion professionals. The Soviet administration could at times show amazing flexibility but it also had some firm limits which could not be overstepped without serious consequences.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 5 (92-132) from Fashion Meets Socialism: Fashion Industry in the Soviet Union after the Second World War, by Jukka Gronow and Sergey Zhuravlev (Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 03.06.2018), published by OAPEN under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license.
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