Tallinn’s fashion house drew on unofficial access to Western styles while working within the Soviet system. Its popular Siluett magazine helped spread new designs across the USSR.
By Dr. Jukka Gronow
Professor of Sociology
Uppsala University
By Dr. Sergei Zhuravlev
Senior Researcher
Institute of Russian History
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Founding of the Tallinn House
In many ways the Tallinn House was a typical middle-sized republican fashion institute that served mainly the local garment industry and the population of Estonia. However, because of its popular fashion journal it was better known than most others and its designs were well received among both the Soviet fashion specialists and the general public with an interest in fashion. The reputation that Estonia enjoyed, along with the two other Baltic States, for being an “internal Soviet West” certainly helped to promote the fame of both the Fashion House and its “house journal.”431 (Fig. 1.)
Estonia along with the other two Baltic Soviet states of Lithuania and Latvia, had formally become part of the Soviet Union in 1940 after a short period of “bourgeois” independence between the two world wars. It was fully integrated into the Soviet administration first after the Second World War. Its reputation for being “Western,” however, dates far back to the times when it was first annexed from the Swedish Baltic Empire at the beginning of the 18th century, and became a province of the Russian Empire. Tallinn was famous for, among other things, its “European” coffee houses which were not found in the Russian regions of the Soviet Union.
The Tallinn House of Fashion Design, Tallinna Moemaja, was formally founded on the 15th of May, 1957 on the order of the Soviet of Ministers (Government) of the Estonian Socialist Soviet Republic. It was a direct effect of the Khrushchev’s “liberal” reforms which granting more authority to and involved the national republics of Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan and others in mutual cultural and economic cooperation on the USSR level. By the 1970s the republican houses of fashion had been opened in the capitals of almost all the Soviet Republics. The Tallinn House was thus from the very beginning an integral part of the All-Union network of the Soviet fashion design institutes (republican and regional), which formed a unified system. It worked under the Ministry of Light Industry of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic, which also financed it and approved its plans and its annual reports. The central fashion institutes in Moscow coordinated its activities in relation to “creative” matters, including fashion and other trends and technological developments by sending information and instructions as well as by organizing meetings and conferences to share professional experiences. On all the above-mentioned subjects the specialists of ODMO and VIALegprom in Moscow supervised the Tallinn House just as they did all the other local republican fashion institutes. However, Moscow could not simply dictate its instructions and norms to them. In practice, each local house had a lot of independence in deciding and planning its future work. In fact, they were regularly encouraged to develop their own creative style and profile.
According to its founding document, the main tasks of the Tallinn House was to design, construct and demonstrate new clothing models, to promote the mass production of new models, and to participate in the activities of the design shops of the garment factories. At the beginning of 1958, it started publishing its own fashion journal, Siluett, in parallel Russian and Estonian editions. Its Russian edition was much larger and soon became well known all over the Soviet Union and in the Eastern European socialist countries.432
According to its long-time employees, the Tallinn House was the only one in the USSR which used the local language (Estonian) rather than Russian as its official working language. The annual reports and plans of the House preserved in the archives are also written in Estonian with the exception of the economic book-keeping documents and letters to the other Soviet fashion institutes. Almost all its designers and workers were Estonian by birth and even the few Russians who worked there spoke fluent Estonian. Its first and long-time director, Anita Burlaka, was an Estonian too – her definitely non-Estonian sounding surname came from her Ukrainian husband. She used to joke that her non-Estonian surname acted as a protective shield and saved the House from any campaigns of “Russification.”
How did the Tallinn House work in practice? At the very start, the number of workers at Moemaja was relatively small. In 1958, the first year of its existence it employed a total of 52 workers, 26 of whom had a secondary educational degree, mostly from the Tallinn Technological Institute of Textile Industry.433 During early years they designed some hundreds of models annually, most of them work clothes and uniforms of various kinds.434 It reached its final size – which remained more or less the same until the end of the Soviet Union – by the mid-1960s and its main organizational structure and features were also established by then.
In addition to several administrative units, such as the economic department and the staff office, it consisted of five departments which dealt directly with fashion design: the department of “light clothes,” that is, indoor clothing, the department of outdoor clothing, the head wear department, the department of fashion exhibitions and the department responsible for the editing of the journal Siluett. The sixth department produced other printed publications such as fashion albums and technical drawings of the individual clothes sold to the public, often in big editions. All these departments were relatively small, the biggest ones with some 20–25 employees. The structure of the Tallinn House was typical of all the republican houses of fashion design in the USSR.
In the beginning the individual designers were attached to the different departments according to their specialization but later they formed a design department of their own servicing all the other departments. Designers thus did not have a narrow specialty of their own but took part in the design of all kinds of clothing. Only the shoe and leather design department had its own designers.435
The situation was the same at ODMO in the 1960s, where Zaitsev was, for example, assigned to design men’s and women’s clothing but also shoes. Only those ODMO designers who dealt with fur, millinery and underwear were strictly specialized from the very beginning. There is some evidence that the tendency towards specialization increased in ODMO, following world-wide tendencies, from the more “flexible” 1960s to the 1980s. This did not seem to be the case at the Tallinn House, where majority of the designers were expected to be ready to design all kinds of clothes every year or even on a monthly basis.
In 1967, when the House celebrated its 10th anniversary, it had 221 employees. As for professional education, 21 had a diploma from the Estonian State Academy of Art. They worked quite efficiently. About 1,600 models were designed during 1967, of which 1,100 were approved for industrial manufacture. In addition, the House produced 2,700 women’s dresses or other clothes as well as 400 wool overcoats and 46,500 hats, mostly wool head wear.436 In addition to the Estonian factories, garment manufacturers from all over the Soviet Union in, for example, Alma-Ata, Dnepropetrovsk, Tashkent, Moscow, Chelyabinsk, Archangel, Kuzbas, Yerevan, Lugansk and Smolensk, ordered samples from the Tallinn House. The most signi cant and permanent customers came, however, from Estonia. According to the former head economist of the Tallinn house about 60 percent of the industrial designs were sold to Estonian factories in the 1960s and 1970s.437 Designs approved for mass production usually reached the customers in no less than two years. Such a situation was typical not only in Estonia but in the USSR as a whole, reflecting the shortcomings of the Soviet bureaucratic system.
Just like all the other Soviet fashion designing bodies, clothes factories and bigger ateliers, the Tallinn fashion house had an artistic council of its own which approved or disapproved of all the new designs. As a matter of fact, several such councils existed side by side. The first one was purely internal, consisting of the House’s own director, its designers and pattern makers. It inspected all the designs first and approved of their further use either in the fashion shows and exhibitions or for industrial production. Three other bigger councils, one for clothes, one for shoes and one for head wear design each existed in addition to the one consisting of the House’s own designers and directors. These bigger councils all had important representatives from the Estonian textile and garment industry, the trade organizations, ministries and so on. The first bigger artistic council dedicated to clothing design was founded in the beginning of 1958, at the very start of the House. In the beginning, it had 14 members but these soon increased to 24.438 The following year it was accompanied by another council with 13 members, specializing in leather and shoe designs.439
The protocol of the first meeting of the artistic council took up several important issues.440 The propagation of fashion was naturally one of the main tasks of the House. This took place in Tallinn but also in the other big towns of Estonia like Tartu, Narva and Pärnu. More importantly, the House was expected to produce similar designs to those that were now imported – mostly illegally – from abroad, thus diminishing the demand for the Western, capitalist clothes. By showing that Soviet designs could successfully compete with Western designs the authorities also hoped to reduce the general appeal of the Western consumer culture among the population. In addition, the importance of also designing men’s fashion and working clothes was emphasized.
The special interest that these councils took, at least ideologically, in the fashion of men’s and work clothing was also typical of ODMO and all the other Soviet fashion institutions in the 1960–1970s. It was not a peculiarity of Tallinn, but a result of general state policy. The members of the council, understandably, also emphasized the special importance of creating good relations between the Tallinn house and the central administrations of trade and industry in Estonia for the success of its future work. Great expectations were also put on the Tallinn House to analyze and assist in planning the general perspectives and trends of the garment industry in Estonia, just as in the case of the central All-Union House of Fashion Design (ODMO) in Moscow.
Just like any Soviet state institution or organization, the Tallinna Moemaja had its own Communist Party organization. It was formally established in 1961 on the initiative of the three Communist Party members then employed at the House, its first director Burlaka among them. Only one of these founding members – she became a long-time Party organizer – had been a Party member since the 1930s, before Estonia became a Soviet republic. Following the ordinary procedure, these three members asked, on the 22nd of September, 1961, the Estonian Communist Party for permission to organize a Party cell at their own workplace.441 During the first years of its existence the Party organization was very small, with just of a couple of members. According to the preserved minutes of the Party cell meetings at the beginning of the 1960s, it had quite a limited impact on the activities of the House. This might be at least partly due to the fact that the director of the House was not only a founding member of the rather small Party organization but was also regularly the one who presented new issues and problems at the Party meetings. Anita Burlaka, together with the Party organizer, undersigned the minutes. Thus its activities did not differ much in practice from the formal administration of the House.
In a typical manner, the meetings took up some minor disciplinary matters among the workers (for instance, sewing clothes privately for customers) as well as complaints and problems concerning the relations between the House and the clothing factories. According to the minutes the House had problems in particular with the Baltika factory, which accused it of producing incorrect patterns and instructions. The House in turn claimed that the Baltika did not and obviously could not follow their patterns at all.442 The Party organization actively recruited new members from among the workers of the House and by the end of the 1960s the number of its members, and consequently the number of the Communists working at the institution, increased to almost twenty.443 Despite obvious increase in the “weight” of the Party, it seems that its role was not very important at Tallinn compared to, for instance, the Party organization at GUM.
New Designs and the Artistic Council
The artistic councils inspected all new designs. They were always shown on live models. It could approve of these designs, disapprove of them or send them back to the designers to be reworked and improved. If the members of the council did not agree, a vote was taken and the majority decided the fate of the design with the chairman’s vote deciding in case of a stalemate. In Tallinn however, the council seemed to approve almost everything that was presented to it in its meetings, and it also regularly sent the majority of the designs presented on to industrial mass production.
In one of the first meetings of the general artistic council it inspected 61 designs and as many as 59 were approved.444 The lists of the new designs became longer at each regular meeting of the council. For instance, at the meeting on the 20th of January 1960, it inspected altogether 115 new designs and all except one were approved. In addition, one out of four designs received the highest quality classi cation.445 Judging from the documents of these meetings, in the eyes of the members of the artistic council the general level of design was obviously quite satisfactory. The work load stabilized on about this level during the later years. In the mid-1970s, the Tallinna Moamaja produced 1,500 new clothing designs each year.446 One should, however, keep in mind that, in addition to totally new models, the council also inspected something called renovated designs as well as duplicates of old designs obviously still in fashion. The 15–20 designers employed at the House each had a quota of about 12–13 new fashion designs to fill each month, which was more than the production norms demanded at, for instance, ODMO.
The head designer distributed the themes each month to each designer. Some designs were made for the fashion shows, some were destined for small series production, and some for industrial production in the big factories. As a rule tasks circulated every half year from one designer to another. This was an organization of labor that the employees obviously welcomed.
The Tallinn House of Fashion Design had one particular way of organizing its work which, at least according to the long-time head pattern maker, was not common among the Soviet fashion houses.447 The pattern makers took part in the design and construction of the new designs very early on, right after the designer had presented her or his first drawings and sketches of the dress to the director or the internal artistic council. After that the designer and the pattern maker worked in close collaboration until the nal patterns with their detailed technical instructions and calculations were finished. When the garment was meant for industrial production, the representatives of the factory could also take part in the planning process from quite early on, thus making it from the beginning more suitable for industrial production. Whether these features, partly explained by the close and long-time collaboration of all those involved, were really unique to the Tallinn House is difficult to judge. In any event, they were an understandable, practical measure to try to bridge the gap between the new fashionable designs created at the houses and the practical and economic restrictions of the consumer goods industry.
Reading the lists of the new designs presented regularly to the artistic council, one can see some interesting changes with time, with new items appearing on the production list of the House. While women’s fashion, dresses, shirts and overcoats, dominated the lists almost totally, with a smaller amount of children’s wear, during the first years of its activity, starting in the mid-1960s, even men’s wear appeared more regularly in the lists. Just like everywhere else in the world of fashion, men’s fashion design could never overtake the great original lead of women’s fashion. In 1960, men’s shirts appeared for the first time for presentation to the artistic council. In 1961, for instance, the novelties included a wedding dress, men’s trousers of cotton as well as a women’s beach outfit. Skiing outfits also appeared regularly in the seasonal collection after this year. More spectacular was probably the appearance of the rst design of women’s trousers to be worn in public – and not as part of a work outfit – in the presentation to the artistic council in the same year.448 The first trouser suit for women, however, was designed in 1968449, the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s can in many ways be regarded as a turning point in the liberalization of the norms of everyday dress culture in the USSR. (Fig. 2.)
The general style of the Tallinn House was, as in the case of the Soviet Union in general, oriented towards functional and practical design. This was dictated both by the general ideological concerns as well as by the many practical constraints limiting the availability of textiles, other raw materials and modern machinery to an equally great degree. The designers and the pattern makers were, due to their long lasting collaboration, quite well aware of the limited technical and economic resources of the clothing factories they mainly cooperated with. The House designed mostly casual wear and a lot of working clothes and other uniforms, for example school uniforms for the population of the Republic. One of their main achievements was designing the uniforms of the whole service personnel for the new flagship of the Soviet Estonian tourism industry, the hotel Viru, built by the Finns and opened in 1972 in the heart of Tallinn. A regular theme that the director took up at the meetings of the Party organization, following the general recommendations of the Soviet Ministry of Light Industry, was the important task of designing clothes for “big” women.450 Gradually, more festive designs like women’s evening dresses and coats made their appearance in the fashion shows and even in the product lists of the factories. Judging from the lists of garments approved for production at the meetings of the artistic council, some clothes, like overcoats, with their calculated production costs, could sometimes be very expensive, with prices of well over 1,000 rubles, equal to half a year’s wages for a worker in the textile industry. Such expensive coats and other clothes were, however, usually not for sale in ordinary Soviet clothing shops and were never produced in any great numbers.
The Design Practice of the Tallinn House
The size and structure of the Tallinn House remained more or less the same from the late 1960s through the 1980s.451 All through its existence it was situated in the same building in the medieval Old Town of Tallinn. The building had three floors but was very small and narrow. All the designers, for instance, had to share one common room.452 To make the situation bearable, the fashion house rented extra room in other parts of town from the biggest Estonian fashion atelier of custom made clothes, Lembitu, where it also had its first show rooms. Lembitu belonged to the Ministry of Everyday Services and was the best fashion atelier in the system of individual sewing, belonging to the class “lux,” in Tallinn and in the whole of Estonia. In the 1960s the Ministry promised the Tallinn House of Fashion a new, larger building with 14 oors and a lot of office and working space. (This coincided with the construction of the brand new building for VIALegrpom in downtown Moscow.) The new house was built accordingly in the center of the city but was in the end given to another state office. Obviously, despite the relatively high status enjoyed by fashion in the Soviet Union, there were other important organizations that could lobby more effectively for their interests among the local governmental and Party administration.
Even though the House worked under relatively poor conditions it did not seem to be difficult to employ new designers and other workers and to keep the old ones on its payroll. The salaries were not very good, close to the average in many female lower white collar professions. The director, the head designer and the heads of the other departments as well as some more qualified workers enjoyed, however, remarkably higher salaries. The pattern makers had usually graduated from the Tallinn Technological Institute of the Textile Industry. The chief economist, for instance, came from the same place of higher learning. Altogether, the workers were recruited locally from among the Estonian specialists. There seems to have been very little circulation of designers and pattern makers among the various republican and regional fashion houses in the Soviet Union. This was at least the case in Tallinn. Three members of the staff in higher positions had received a diploma of higher education from the most prestigious institutes of professional higher education in the All-Union Ministry of Light Industry, two in Leningrad and one in Moscow. Among these were the main pattern maker, who graduated from the evening classes of the Moscow Textile Institute in 1976, and the head designer. They had all by that point served the House for several years and were sent to Moscow and Leningrad to increase their professional qualifications and status, obviously associated with their leading positions at the organization. All the other designers and pattern makers were educated in Tallinn or, to some degree, in Kaunas, in close – by Lithuania. As a rule, the designers had spent some time, many of them much time, at ODMO on Kuznetskii Most Street in Moscow on short term working assignments (usually one month at a time).
A typical feature was the total lack of underwear design at the ordinary Soviet fashion institutes and houses. Tallinn was no exception in this respect. Somewhat amazingly, taking into account the generally heavy emphasis usually put on the centralized nature of Soviet planning, there was no specialization and no overall plan for the division of labor among the different fashion institutions in the Soviet Union, not even, say, between the Baltic Republics and the nearby Leningrad or Minsk houses, to which the Tallinn designers had otherwise close relations.453 The local fashion design administrative units, working under the republican ministries of the consumer goods industry, could thus remain relatively free from central interference and organize their own work. The central, All-Union institutes in Moscow were keener to set the general stylistic trends for Soviet fashion than to interfere in the annual production plans of their local counterparts. This can be explained at least partly by the fact that the main function of all these Houses, Tallinn included, was to serve their own republican clothing industries. Estonia had several big clothing manufacturers which dated from the pre-war period, the women’s clothing factory Klementi being the biggest and best known among them. But men’s wear, children’s clothes, and knitwear were also produced in Estonia. These factories sold their products partly outside of Estonia too. Likewise, Estonia had its own relatively good textile factories which produced raw materials for these and other Soviet garment factories.454
As the old workers of the Tallinn House still remember, getting access to good textiles and other materials was often a very difficult task which demanded great personal effort from the designer. Even though the House had one specially employed worker (tolkach) whose main task was to buy and get supplies of attractive textiles and other necessary raw materials, all the designers engaged in these activities themselves too. While visiting their customers at the factories, fashion conferences or meetings and consultations in the other cities and republics, they used the opportunity to provide themselves with new, more fashionable textiles and other raw materials. If they could not find what they wanted, which was often the case, they would even make some things themselves, for example dying clothes to get more fashionable colors.
The Tallinn House designed almost all the new models for all the Estonian clothing factories. Klementi, the biggest women’s clothing factory in Estonia, had, however, fashion designers of its own. Klementi’s own designers, working in its experimental laboratory, were responsible for approximately half of all the new designs taken into production in this factory. The other half came from the Tallinn House; in all the other Estonian clothing factories practically all came from Moemaja’s designers. Baltika produced men’s costumes, Virulane women’s overcoats, Marat knitwear, and so on. As the representatives of the Tallinn House proudly reported, even though the Estonian garment factories were its main customers, its designs were popular and sought after by other Soviet producers too, in Leningrad and Moscow as well as in many far away locations. Kaliningrad, on the Baltic coast near-by, had a big clothing factory which was an important customer and to which new collections were regularly taken and shown. An interesting example of the Soviet division of labor in the field of fashion was that Moemaja designed new school uniforms, twice during its lifetime, for all Estonian- speaking schoolchildren. The Russian-speaking schools in Estonia used the standard All-Union uniforms designed in Moscow instead.
The Economy and Basic Tasks of the House
According to the long-time head economist of Moemaja, the main income of the fashion house came from its own fashion journal, Siluett, founded as early as 1958.455 In addition to its general issues which for the most part consisted, following the example of the famous international fashion journals, of women’s fashion, Siluett also regularly published special issues on children’s fashion and, more rarely, on work clothes. This journal had a huge Russian edition at its best in the 1970s, and a much smaller edition in Estonian. Its Russian edition grew from about one hundred to three hundred thousand (the peak was reached in 1972 after which its edition somewhat diminished). The Estonian language edition was about 50,000. A few thousands, in Russian, were even sold abroad, in Czechoslovakia and the GDR.456 The editorial board of the journal was, not correspondingly, quite small: it had one regular editor, one assistant editor, a secretary and a typist on its staff.457 The photographer, just like most of the models, was not employed permanently at the House but free-lanced for the journal.
The income from the popular fashion journal made up at best about 60 percent of the total annual budget of the Tallinn House of Fashion. The House did not, however, receive all the net income from the sales of this journal since the Ministry took care of its distribution and gave only a certain sum to the House. As everyone was eager to claim, they could easily have sold many more copies of the journal and made an even better profit from it. The main restriction was the availability of paper. The journal was printed first in Riga, Latvia, but later on in a printing house in Tallinn. As a rule, “our men” traveled personally to the paper factory up North in the White Sea region, with bottles of the famous Vana Tallinn (Old Tallinn liqueur) and other similar delicacies from Estonia, not for sale elsewhere, and brought a train load full of paper back with them.458 The concrete reason for the final and very abrupt collapse of the whole economy of the Tallinn House was that after the new independence of Estonia in 1991 it could not collect the income from the sales of the last issue of Siluett, which had already been delivered to the subscribers and press agencies in Russia and the other parts of the Soviet Union. Therefore, the House lost its main source of income quite abruptly and unexpectedly and was forced to close down.
The other notable sources of income were royalties from the factories that ordered the designs and the income from the tickets sold for the regularly organized big fashion shows. Despite the fact that serving the clothing factories and helping them to produce better and more fashionable clothing was the main purpose of the whole design enterprise in Tallinn as elsewhere, according to the long-time head economist of Moemaja this was not particularly profitable because the pricing was unfavorable to the House.459 This was a common complaint among the Soviet design professionals. It is difficult to say whether the terms of trade were more favorable in the bigger central Houses, but the Moscow designers complained too that their main activity was not profitable either. Another complaint that the representatives of Soviet fashion voiced constantly was that the centralized pricing system made the introduction and rapid change of new, fashionable clothing economically almost impossible. As we have seen elsewhere too, the local actors tried to solve this problem in many creative ways, both official and non-official or half-legal. In 1967 the inspectors from the Estonian Ministry of Light Industry, for instance, suddenly discovered that the Estonian clothing factories, trade organizations and the Tallinn House of Fashion Design had established among themselves a price council which was totally informal and as such illegal. Instead of sending their applications for new prices to the Ministry, as they should have done according to the rules, they decided the prices in practice among themselves. This informal council was consequently abolished on the 27th of November, 1967.460 Only during the last years of the Soviet Union, in the beginning of the 1980s, when the factories were allowed to pay an extra premium of 25 percent for any design which was taken into production as a novelty, did the industrial design of clothes for mass production became economically more profitable to the Tallinn House of Fashion as well as to the other Soviet fashion design organizations. Under the centralized planned economy, the Moemaja had, however, to turn out a certain amount of new designs for industry every year whether this was profitable or not. Economic profitability was also only part of the deal: it was very important for the professional reputation and status of a house of fashion in the USSR – as well as for its designers and pattern makers – that the garment factories, even outside the borders of its own republic, were willing to take the house’s designs into production.
As the previous designers and pattern makers of the Tallinn House told, the representatives of the factories often came to the House to inspect new designs. These were also shown in fashion exhibitions in different parts of the Soviet Union in which such representatives also took part. In addition, the House took its own collections to show to the factories – or at least this was done with its more regular and sizable customers. From these reports one gets the impression that the selling and ordering of new designs mainly took place on such occasions. The inclusion of designs in All-Union collections and catalogues or lists of new fashionable clothes was thus of less practical importance to those included but was certainly very prestigious for the designer and the house she or he represented.461
In addition to these three basic forms of activities – designs for mass production, drawings and patterns for the fashion journal and designs for both the more regular and exceptional fashion shows and exhibitions – the House produced small series of clothes. These series could consist of a few hundred (200–600) examples of different kinds of clothes. These were sold in several Estonian clothing shops, not only in Tallinn but in Tartu and Pärnu, too. The Tallinn clothing store Mood (Fashion) opened up in the late 1960s. It sold fashionable clothes of higher quality, among others clothes produced in small series at the Tallinn House. It was, however, not Moemaja’s own “boutique” since it sold clothes from other manufacturers too. The Tallinn fashion house sold its own production through other regular clothing shops too. What the economic result of this activity was is not clear, but due to the relatively small series of clothes sewn it could not be that important in the whole annual budget. On the other hand, the Tallinn House had a big atelier of woolen head wear with its own – very few – fashion designers, which produced tens of thousands of hats a year and which turned out to be quite profitable. (Fig. 3.)
The Tallinn House of Fashion Design did not have an atelier serving individual customers. However, as most similar Soviet fashion houses, Moemaja sewed customized clothes for the local political and cultural elite as well as for the wives of prominent citizens, like those of the Ministers or the members of the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party despite the fact that it did not have a regular clothing atelier of its own. Just as the other parts of the Soviet Union, Tallinn and other towns in Estonia had their own ateliers of individual sewing or custom made clothes which were organized into three different quality classes. As a rule, they and not the fashion houses were supposed to take care of all the individual orders of the population, its political elite included. But the fashion houses serviced some special individual clients personally too. The same dressmakers who sewed other clothes for the exhibitions and fashion shows took care of these individual orders on the side. How general this practice was and to what extent it varied from one year or decade to another is not known. As an example, the former workers told a story about the wife of the Minister of Estonian Agriculture, who claimed that she had the right to order an evening dress from the Fashion House since her husband was in charge of providing the fertilizers so essential to Estonian agriculture.462
The Siluett Fashion Journal
The Siluett fashion journal was well known and highly appreciated among its readers all over the Soviet Union – according to the former editor they often received readers’ letters from distant places in the Soviet Union, like the shores of the Pacific Ocean.463 In his history of Russian fashion, Aleksander Vasil’ev, for instance, mentioned the two Baltic journals of fashion, the Latvian Rigas modes and even more the Estonian Siluett on several occasions as the most popular and artistically advanced fashion periodicals in the USSR.464 Other republican fashion houses distributed their own fashion journals too, like the Ukrainian Krasota i moda, Banga in Lithuania or the Alma-Ata, Kazakhstan based Modalar, but either they did not have as wide of an All-Union circulation or their printing was of an inferior quality. Under the chronic conditions of paper limitations only those Houses that had the best reputation and could be expected to regularly provide high quality fashion designs and examples had the privilege of publishing fashion journals of their own. In some cases the reasons might have been more directly political too: the journals were published, for example, to prove the existence of the high standards of Soviet Central Asian fashion and the achievements of that culture in general.
The editor of the journal explained that there were two main reasons for the success of Siluett, the first of which was the relatively high quality of its illustrations and published patterns. The fame of Tallinn among the Soviet citizens as an almost Western city probably helped too. But its best sales asset was the detailed drawings of the patterns of the new clothes attached to each issue of the journal. If we are to believe its editors, Siluett was the only Soviet fashion journal that regularly provided to its subscribers such drawings and detailed technical instructions in its special attachments. Therefore it was extremely useful to its female subscribers and readers. The quality of the printing depended on the quality of the printing paper and the press and varied from one year to the next. The journal was always published in good printing houses, first in Latvia, later in Tallinn. The editors made the whole layout of each issue – drawing, cutting and gluing by hand – in their office. However, aer the layout and the proof copy had been finished, it could take as long as one and a half years before it was printed and distributed to its readers – another good example of the relative slowness of the Soviet fashion system.
Each issue of the journal had several standard parts, mostly dedicated to new clothing designs – women’s and men’s garments, overcoats, children’s wear and festive evening dresses – but it also regularly gave space to the issues of hairdressing, cosmetics, the education of taste and the history of fashion. The Tallinn House of Fashion Design employed, like all the other Soviet houses, a “fashion propagandist,” or an art historian. Instructions on how to keep one’s body fit were also a legitimate and popular subject in the journal. Just as in other Soviet fashion journals, the demands which different body figures set for the choice of dress were also a regularly repeated topic in Siluett.
Before being sent to print, each issue was inspected by a special committee of external censors who came to the office of the journal where the layout of the next issue was waiting for them. Among them were high-ranking members of the Communist Party and representatives of the Ministry.465 The main representative of the Estonian Communist Party in this Committee was a woman who had a reputation for being particularly keen on controlling the sexual decency of the illustrations. Too much bare flesh, like low-cut dresses, should not be revealed in the pictures! Since the editors knew these restrictions concerning, for instance, the poses of the models, problems did not usually occur. Obviously the members of the control committee, just like almost everyone else involved with the House, served a long time in their respective positions. Since Soviet fashion was for many a life-long occupation everyone knew what to expect from each other.
One of the former editors of the journal recalled only one breach of rules leading to serious reprimands in the history of the journal.466 In 1970, an illustrator had drawn for purely decorative purposes a cross – like those on the shields of the Knights Templar – on the corner of the drawing of a new fashionable design. e inspecting censors had not paid any attention at all to this “religious symbol” but when the journal had already been printed and distributed someone alarmed the Central Committee of the Estonian Communist Party. As a consequence, the director of the House was called to the Central Committee and seriously reprimanded. The illustrator and the editor were moved to other, less prestigious tasks in the House. In addition to such “religious symbols” the color combination of black, blue and white – symbols of pre-war independent Estonia – was strictly forbidden in the illustrations. The editors of Siluett knew this quite well since a bulletin of the local fashion design students had once been confiscated for this reason. Siluett, like many other Soviet fashion journals, regularly published – usually on their last pages – pictures of the new foreign and Western fashion designs. These came mostly from Paris, but could also come from Italy, England, or at times even from countries less known for their fashion industry like Sweden. These pictures were copied directly from the Western fashion journals and publications without any extra information or explanations. This practice, however, came to an end in the 1980s when it was officially forbidden.
The editors could be quite innovative in planning the settings of their photo shoots. Often newly built and still empty buildings, like the brand new Viru hotel were used as shooting locations, but the views and surroundings of the medieval old town often served as an interesting background location too. Even the new “luxurious” lavatory in the hotel could be used as an interesting, photographic set-up. The editors and illustrators of Siluett even did some commissioned work for the journal published by the Leningrad House of Fashion Design. As a sign of the new times and as an attempt to adapt to the new commercial market, Siluett employed a Finnish fashion photographer to take the pictures for the issue that then proved to be its last ever.
Contacts with the Other Soviet Fashion Houses
The workers at the Tallinn House kept up regular contacts with other Soviet fashion institutions and their colleagues working there. The first representatives of the Tallinn House visited ODMO in Moscow as early as February 1958, at the very time of the opening of the House in Tallinn.467 They regularly visited annual and seasonal All-Union or regional meetings and consultations organized by ODMO or VIALegprom, which usually met once or twice a year and were arranged according to the special line of work (like overcoats, women’s dress, children’s wear, etc.) or by professional specialization (designers, pattern makers, economists, etc.). The pattern makers and the designers met regularly among themselves at what could be called courses or meetings for further training in order to keep up their professional quali cations. These meetings were highly appreciated and the work organization of the participants took care of all the travel expenses. They could take place almost anywhere in the Soviet Union, at Tashkent just as well as at Moscow, and understandably such work trips gave the participants a welcome opportunity to visit interesting places and sights as well as socialize with colleagues. As mentioned earlier, many designers and pattern makers spent a month at ODMO in Moscow in order to get acquainted with the workings, the new technical and stylistic inventions, of the best Soviet fashion institutions.468 The representatives of the Tallinn House naturally took part in the annual or seasonal fashion exhibitions in Moscow during which the All-Union collections were selected.469
In addition to their colleagues from Moscow (ODMO) Tallinn designers also had regular contacts with the other fashion houses in the North-West part of the USSR: Riga, Vilnius and Minsk.470 As a matter of fact ODMO regularly organized not only All-Union meetings, but also (taking into account the size of the country) regional meetings of fashion designers and other specialists in the field, aiming to establish closer cooperation between “neighbors.” In addition to Minsk, Riga and Vilnius, Tallinn also had many contacts with the Leningrad House of Fashion Design. Usually leading specialists from Moscow also came to the regional meetings in order to discuss mutual problems and to present papers on recent and prospective fashion trends. One after another these Houses of Fashion Design hosted such regional events. After formal meetings, informal parties took place.
A typical All-Union meeting lasted several days. All the participants took some new designs of their own with them which they presented to the other participants and discussed collectively. Sometimes the critique could be rather hard. An artistic council consisting of, among others, the representatives of the Moscow central fashion institute VIALegprom and the Ministry of Light Industry took part in these meetings too. Often their verdict on the new designs was both feared and appreciated. In this way, all the Soviet head pattern makers or head designers, at least from the same part of the country, got to know each other quite well. And since they almost without exception stayed at the same fashion house for the biggest part of their professional lives these contacts could develop into close friendships too. These contacts were thus sincerely missed aer they were radically broken off at the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In the early 1970s, Tallinn hosted a nationwide seminar on designing and pattern making for the first time. Obviously Tallinn did not have the honor of organizing such meetings often. Only during perestroika in the late 1980s did the Tallinn House start to regularly organize its own Estonian fashion weeks, inviting guests from all over the Soviet Union. These fashion weeks came to an end when Estonia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.
Fashion Shows and Exhibitions
In the popular imagination, Tallinn was a gate to the West. It was therefore no wonder that the leading designers from all over the Soviet Union, for example Leningrad, Moscow, and Sverdlovsk, visited it regularly in order to get inspiration and new ideas about fashion trends. A good proof of the relatively high esteem of fashion both in the Estonian Ministry of Light Industry and in the Soviet Union was that its director, Anita Burlaka, was soon after the founding of her House, sent on a long work mission to Budapest, Hungary to get acquainted with the Hungarian institutes of fashion design. The trip, which typically went via Moscow, lasted almost a month.471 Only the director and the head designer of the Tallinn House, followed by the best fashion models, ever traveled abroad with its fashion collections.472 In Tallinn the designers did not follow their own collections abroad, not even to the other socialist countries.
The collections of the House did not take part in many international fashion exhibitions. When they traveled abroad they were usually part of the general Soviet Trade Exhibitions.473 The first exhibition in which the Tallinn House took part, the World Fair in Brussels, was typical in this respect. The role of the Estonian fashion designers in the EXPO-67 at Canada was slightly different. ODMO designed a whole fashion collection with national motifs from the Estonian, Turkmen, Tadjik and Kirghiz Soviet Republics in collaboration with the designers from these republics. The Estonian designers consequently took part in designing the Estonian collection.474 Compared to the big houses of fashion design in Moscow, Tallinn’s international participation and performance was after all rather modest. But it was understandably extremely important and prestigious to all those involved.
The task of designing a collection for the World Fair in Brussels in 1958 faced the House at its very founding. Other exhibitions followed in Zagreb, Yugoslavia and Capri, Italy (in the 1972 “Sea and Fashion” organized by the Italian-Soviet friendship society). The visit to Capri was understandably a deeply cherished memory for those involved and everyone remembered it with great pride. Again, new possibilities opened up with the new political winds in the 1980s: a fashion exhibition at Izmir in Turkey followed by Basel, Switzerland.
From the very beginning, the Tallinn House organized big public fashion shows twice a year in Tallinn for which tickets were sold to the spectators. They quickly became very popular. After a modest beginning they were eventually organized at the big Estonia concert hall or the Kalev sports hall. 15,000 spectators at a time saw these shows in the 1970s and 1980s. They were obviously quite entertaining, with highly ambitious programs. Asa rule, they lasted two hours and were organized twice during three days. A big orchestra of seven well-known Estonian musicians accompanied them.475 As early as 1958, the House organized a special course for all its regular models. A famous Estonian ballerina, Inge Poeder, taught them how to walk and move their bodies more gracefully on the catwalk when presenting new clothes.476 These courses became a regular part of the schooling of new models even during the later years.
Just like other Soviet fashion designing units, the Tallinn House toured the country and took its popular fashion shows and exhibitions to other towns, factories or kolkhozes.477 As the main male model of the 1970s, Jüri Siim, remembered, he had visited almost every corner of Estonia and the Soviet Union touring with shows and exhibitions. Other Soviet fashion organizations hired his services too. He cherished the memory of these times and told that he and his colleagues were treated extremely well all over the Soviet Union. Being Estonian, tall and blond, and exceptionally fashionably dressed they were taken to be almost foreigners.478
The new designs presented in these shows were designed just for the shows. Only exceptionally were any of them taken into industrial production. Each show had 12 to 13 themes decided by the head designer and each of these was the responsibility of one designer. Children’s wear as well as costumes following the national ethnic motifs belonged to the obligatory repertoire of all these shows. (The designers’ own or their colleagues’ children often acted as models for the children’s wear.)
The great popularity of these fashion shows can be partly explained by the fact that they served a very practical purpose for their fashion conscious spectators, who often directly copied new designs by making their own drawings of the most interesting ones. It seems obvious that the fashion shows faced the same dilemma – in miniature – as the whole Soviet fashion industry: if the designs were too practically oriented they soon lost their value as good entertainment and the interest of the consumers. If, on the other hand, they became too spectacular and extravagant, the customers did not have any other use for them other than just admiring them like any work of art. Consequently, when these shows became more extravagant and artistic in the 1980s during perestroika, and ever more distanced from industrial production, they lost a great deal of their popularity and audience.
An Almost European House of Fashion
The Tallinn House was famous for its “European” style within the USSR. Tallinn, like Riga, Vilnius, or Kaunas had, in fact, had a lot of fashion ateliers and tailors’ shops during its independence before 1940, with close contacts to the great European centers of fashion in Paris, Berlin and London. More concretely this reputation was, however, due to the fact that the new fashion designs from the West often reached the Tallinn House even earlier than Moscow. The Tallinn Fashion House could not subscribe to any Western fashion journals. Instead, the central Moscow fashion units, ODMO and VIALegprom, subscribed to them. One of their main tasks was to circulate selected examples of useful new Western designs to the republican and other local fashion houses. It could therefore take a long time before they ever reached Tallinn or the other “provinces.” e fashion designers in Tallinn had, however, a more direct and unocial channel to the new creations and world-wide trends of Western fashion. Many old Estonians and inhabitants of Tallinn had close relatives who had emigrated abroad, to Sweden, Canada, and the USA, and who often sent parcels home, many of them including such popular fashion journals as Vogue or Burda. They, for their part, often sold these valuable and rare items to a particular second hand book store in Tallinn. A particular employee of the Fashion House, in her turn, had the responsibility of visiting this book store every week and buying all its new fashion journals for the Fashion House. In this way the designers had direct and immediate access to the latest news from the Western fashion world. This practice was, of course, totally unofficial and bordering on illegal. It was, however, common knowledge to all those included, and also announced without any further comments in the Party meeting at the House.479 Another important channel of importing new fashion to Tallinn was the storeroom of the customs office, with which the House had a similar unofficial deal. As soon as new clothes or garments were confiscated at the border from tourists or smugglers, a representative of the House was informed and had the right to collect these items. This way they could get their hands not only on pictures of new designs but even on concrete examples of new fashionable clothes and textiles. Thus there were some very concrete and simple reasons why the Tallinn designers really were better informed and more up to date about the latest developments of the world’s great fashion centers than even the head designers at the central Soviet fashion institutes in Moscow.
The Soviet fashion institutes were in general interested in receiving not only fashion journals and other information about tendencies in the fashion world but also concrete examples of fashionable clothing. Therefore the Soviet foreign trade organizations in Paris, London, Rome, Berlin, and New York were ordered by the government to help Soviet designers and pattern makers in the field by collecting samples of fashionable clothing. The All-Union Chamber of Commerce in Moscow was another important source or channel of such concrete information. When foreign firms, interested in establishing cooperation with the USSR and in selling clothes on the Soviet market, presented examples of the fashionable clothing they aimed at producing in the near future, the representatives from the Soviet fashion institutes used them non-officially as a free source of information about the latest fashion trends.480 In some cases the items were sent from Moscow to the various regional fashion organizations. Sometimes the items were ripped up into small pieces in order to better learn their pattern and sewing technology. From this point of view the Tallinn designers were in a privileged position as they had almost unlimited access not only to such information (through the journals and relatives abroad) but also to the fashionable Western items in the local second hand shops. Fashion designers from ODMO visited Tallinn regularly, probably in order to enjoy the same “privileges” as their Estonian colleagues as well as to breathe Tallinn’s European air.481 Moreover, contrary to, for example, the house of fashion design in the city of Barnaul in the Altai region, Tallinn was a well-known tourist target with thousands of visitors who came mainly from nearby Finland across the Gulf of Finland, and it was enough to see how foreigners were dressed to obtain knowledge of the novelties in the field of fashion trends. In addition, the habitants of Tallinn could follow the programs of the Finnish TV.482
Whether it depended on these close and direct contacts to the West, on its historical heritage or on the particular creativity of its fashion designers, the Tallinn Fashion House belonged, together with the other Baltic houses, to the leading fashion institutes in the USSR. When the 23rd Congress of the Communist Party opened in Moscow in March 1966, Tallinn was, together with the Moscow ODMO, Leningrad and the other two Baltic fashion houses, invited to demonstrate its collection – with live models – to the Party delegates and the official foreign guests in Moscow. It was a special honor to be selected from among all the Soviet Houses of Fashion design and invited to participate in this “closed” fashion exhibition.483 This congress was namely expected to take important economic and political measures in order to stimulate the growth of the consumer goods industry and fashion in the USSR. The Tallinn designers, together with their colleagues from the other five participating houses, had the honor of acting, in this way, as practical examples of how the rest of the Soviet fashion industry could and should work in order to fulfill the high expectations invested in it by the Soviet people and their political leaders.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 7 (173-191) 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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