Due to high prices a fashionable suit was regarded as a luxury and a means of social distinction.
By Dr. Jukka Gronow
Professor of Sociology
Uppsala University
By Dr. Sergei Zhuravlev
Senior Researcher
Institute of Russian History
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Revolutionary Background of Soviet Fashion and Anti-Fashion
Both theoretically and practically the foundations of Soviet fashion were created during the difficult and eventful years after the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Civil War. Since these formative years of Soviet history in the 1920s to 1940s had such a great impact on almost all of the aspects of the establishment of Soviet fashion as well as on the public opinion about dress code and fashion, it is necessary to give a short account of this “prehistory” of the Soviet fashion industry in order to be able to understand and analyze the specificity of the post-war developments in the world of fashion.
In the beginning of the twentieth century, fashion and fashionable clothing were associated mainly with urban culture as well as with material well-being and one’s closeness to the ruling estate, while the overwhelming majority of the Russian population lived in villages in the countryside. Ordinary people bought linen, which was more or less available in the shops or markets, and wore mostly homemade clothes. This was particularly true in the case of children and the casual dress of adults. Buying ready-made clothes was a special event which families reserved for the more festive moments of life. Clothes bought in a shop or in a department store were, as a rule, formal attire.
Due to high prices a fashionable suit was regarded as a luxury anda means of social distinction. The huge inequality between the classes, the poverty of the great masses of the population, the age old tradition of serfdom and the strict system of social stratification created by the tsarist regime greatly increased hatred against the “exploiters,” directed in particular towards their “frivolous” way of life with its accompanying dress code.62 As one of the famous Bolsheviks wrote, a deep abyss divided the two worlds of the “black” and the “clean” citizens, which was reflected in the wide spread resentment which ordinary people felt toward their “clean masters.”63 Another eyewitness of the red mutiny who looked at the revolutionary events from the other side of the class barrier, the well-known attorney at law N. Maier, characterized the atmosphere of the times in the following manner:
“The bitterness of the lower classes towards anyone who carried the outer signs of the privileged classes became accentuated to the extent that it was impossible, for instance, to travel in the tram without becoming the target of cursing.”64
It is no wonder that the revolutionary masses who judged their fellow citizens on the basis of their outer appearance (clothes, eye-glasses, calluses on working hands, etc.) hardly recognized any difference between the various representatives of the upper classes in their clean and beautiful dress, whether they were land owners, capitalists, tsarist civil servants or ordinary members of the intelligentsia it was all the same to them. During the years of the civil war, characterized by many spontaneous outbursts of anger and aggression, clothing served as the main evidence of a person’s social status. The Red Army Commander Semen Budennyi told a characteristic story in his memoirs. In the middle of the fighting with General Anton Denikin’s “White Army,” the Red guards arrested two “members of the bourgeoisie” wearing glasses, “dressed in long tailor-made fur coats.” Because of their outer appearance the Red guards were ready to shoot them. The two well-dressed prisoners turned out in fact to be very high ranking Soviet leaders, the head of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK), Mikhail Kalinin, and the head of the Ukrainian Central Executive Committee, Grigory Petrovskii. All efforts to convince the soldiers of their real identities with the help of their mandates undersigned by Vladimir Lenin proved to be ineffective: the soldiers could not read and they had been used to judging their exploiters primarily all by their outer appearance and clothing.65
When the workers’ “revolutionary consciousness of right and wrong” was substituted for law and order, people’s outer appearance played an important role. “It is enough to refer to his well-kept face and hands without any calluses to accuse some one of being a bourgeois”66 proclaimed S. S. Zorin, a member of the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet. To appear on the street dressed in a top hat and expensive and fashionable dress which was typical of the members of the former ruling class, caused aggression and could cost one one’s life. It was typical that it was not only the exploiters themselves who caused anger but also the attributes of the “cursed past” belonging to them: a costume with a waistcoat, a monocle, a ne fur hat, as well as, in the judgement of the ordinary man, luxurious living quarters-exquisite furniture, a home library, a grand piano, and so on.67
At this time it would have been difficult to imagine that these hated objects, which in the eyes of the victorious proletariat symbolized the former luxurious life of the exploiters, would in less than 20 years turn into the cherished symbols of the real socialist culture legitimated by Soviet power. Nevertheless, the association between the social status of the citizen and his or her clothing, dress code, etc., which went back in history and was deeply rooted in the consciousness of the common man and woman, never totally disappeared in later Soviet times either.
It was no wonder that after the Revolution the old “bourgeois” fashion, as a part of the questionable cultural heritage of the past, became the object of keen discussions and disputes: should the victorious proletariat create its own “proletarian fashion”? If the answer was in the armative how it would in fact differ from “bourgeois fashion”? Did the social and cultural phenomenon of fashion have a right to exist at all under Communism? It was obvious to many that the drastic changes caused by the Revolution in life style should be followed by equally radical changes in the outer appearance of human beings. In some cases it was easy to see how the Revolution directly stimulated new fashionable tendencies: The leather coats of the commissars, the red cavalry head wear, budennovki, red ribbons, and other equally popular references to the attributes of the revolutionary Bolshevik era were often regarded by fashion professionals as examples of spontaneously created “revolutionary fashion.” Many idealists thought that the victorious proletariat would have a totally different relationship to the “world of things” and Maxim Gorky, the so-called stormy petrel of the Revolution, declared war against the petit bourgeois mentality, the well-known “human remnant of the old society” – the “thirst for the bait,” or the bourgeois submissiveness in the face of material offerings and comfort. (Fig. 1.)
During the cultural radicalism and the popularity of the ideals of the Proletkult movement in the 1920s when young revolutionary radicals suggested that all old bourgeois culture, including Pushkin and Raphael, should be thrown on the dung heap, fashion was also labeled a typical “remnant” of the aristocratic and bourgeois way of life not worthy of the new proletarian aesthetics. New proletarian culture was now to be created practically from point zero.68 Fashion was obviously understood to be a sign of the exclusive elitism which had been propagated by the fashion journals and albums of haute couture. It had nothing to do with the rags commonly seen in the working districts, which followed the changes of fashion, if at all, at a much slower pace and more spontaneously. Haute couture’s exclusiveness was its most distinctive feature in the minds of its socialist critics. In accordance with the common understanding of those times, real fashionable clothes were, in contrast to the ones that were mass produced and could be bought in clothing stores, sewn by hand by a famous dressmaker or tailor at a fashion atelier. Thus they automatically carried an individual flavor which guaranteed their high quality and made them chosen examples of rare art. For the majority of the population they were simply too expensive, not available at all or too fine and impractical for everyday use. In the opinions of the representatives of the Proletkult, the creations that were born in the “inflamed” brains of the fashion designers were too “artificial” and suffered from their close resemblance to other items of “highbrow” art and culture. Being unavailable to the majority of the population, they were interpreted to as an expression of snobbery which artificially raised itself above the supposed “undeveloped cultural demands” of the common man and woman. The excesses of fashion, expressing the measuring stick of the old society, were undemocratic. Furthermore, with fashion’s help the ruling class elevated their own tastes far above the tastes of the other citizens.
Soviet Russia had by the end of the 1920s firmly established itself on the world map and was even understood by many Western intellectuals to be the center of human progress, a real alternative to the rotten old world with its discredited moral and cultural values. Many expected that it would also become a real turning point in the history of fashion. The question of the reorientation of the “old” fashion, which had been produced only for a few select people, and the consequent democratization of the world of fashion, became important in the cultural politics of the first socialist country in the world. The new fashion should be democratic, reoriented according to the size of the wallet as well as other practical needs of the ordinary consumer.
Under these conditions, the representatives of the Proletkult continued their active propaganda for a functional, in essence practical, aesthetic style – a new ideal of beauty which would be to a greater degree in line with the goals of the new society. In the sphere of fashion this new style almost paradoxically took the form of an anti-fashion.69 Its critique was directed at the whole system of fashion as such with its rapid changes of style. Old fashion in its bourgeois packaging was totally unnecessary and did not serve any real function in the new society. The new anti-fashion aimed at the ideal of a wholly functional dress, a uniform for different occasions and professions which would suit every individual despite differences in gender or age. Such a uniform would liberate everyone from the futile need to pay attention to individual differences. Taking stable and common human needs as a starting point one could annihilate all kinds of rapid and unnecessary changes in fashion and liberate human beings, women in particular, from the “slavery of fashion.” The new vanguard of the proletarian aesthetics distanced itself, from the frivolous and whimsical nature of traditional fashion in general, and not only from its concrete creations.
Similar ideas regarding the creation of a new kind of clothing free of unnecessary details, trimmings and decorations, common in the 1920s in Soviet Russia, had been part of many previous utopian ideas of radically reforming the world. Many talented and progressively thinking people among artists, designers and intellectuals had defended such a position, at least for a time.70 These ideals were thus by no means any real Soviet inventions. The Russian artistic vanguard of the beginning of the 1920s followed in this respect the radical European and North American arts and crafts movement with its ideals of the functionality of dress as well as the movement of “reform dress,” which had been popular at the turn of century and which the more radical feminism in particular supported and propagated in many Western European countries as well as in North America.71 What united them all was that they presumed that functional was beautiful and use came before aesthetics. Clothes should serve only natural and basic human needs and not be subservient to social competition or exhibition, which enslaved women living under capitalism in particular.
In Christine Ruane’s opinion, Russian fashion trends in the 1920s returned to some extent to their pre-war tendencies, which the outbreak of the First World War had interrupted, by integrating backward Russia into the Western and European culture.72 According to Ruane, anti-fashion movements had been popular among the Russian intelligentsia during the war. The rapidly growing consumerism was, in the minds of the radical intelligentsia, associated with fashion. As they argued “resources should be used for the betterment of society and should not be squandered on fashion.”73 By demonstratively wearing simple peasant clothes they imagined themselves to be breaking social barriers and they encouraged ordinary people to reject fashion too. At the same time nationalistic circles rejected fashion as “Western or foreign business.” In June 1916 the import of luxury goods like fashionable clothes was banned as part of the wartime economic regulation. Similar legislation existed in other war waging European nations. Fashion magazines disappeared in Russia during the war too. As Ruane argued, the Bolsheviks transformed this pre-war anti-fashion discourse about the wastefulness of fashion and the following wartime ban on luxury goods into an attack against petit-bourgeois philistinism. Anti-fashion discourse was particularly strong during the New Economic Policy of the 1920s when the Bolsheviks had to deal with the problem of growing economic and social differences due to the partial rehabilitation of the market economy.
The New Economic Policy (NEP), which the Soviet government adopted in 1921, only helped to intensify the discussion about the nature and destiny of fashion in the coming society and raised a lively debate about fashion as a “hostile remnant from the class society.” During NEP in 1921–1928, due to a more open policy on small scale private entrepreneurship, Western in uences reached Soviet fashion freely and rapidly. The broad masses of the population who earned their meager livelihood with hard work associated the fashion “explosion” of the 1920s not only with the “wild life” in the restaurants and clubs, but in general with the dissipation and lavish spending of the nepman, who had now quite suddenly become rich. More generally, social inequality increased again forcefully and the majority of the population had no means of acquiring a share of this new “beautiful” and luxurious life. With NEP new fashion ateliers were opened in the cities again, as well as beauty salons and antique shops, which shocked the ordinary public with their pre-revolutionary styles imitating the lifestyle of the tsarist aristocracy. The profession of the milliner became, quite unexpectedly, popular again. Fashion journals started to publish in great numbers again, propagating festive clothing, etc. (Fig. 2.) While Russia had hardly recovered from the hard years of the Civil war and was still mourning its many dead, the “fashionable grimace” of the NEP was reminiscent of a feast in times of plague, thus creating a highly negative image around the cultural phenomenon of fashion. In his article “Moscow. From the way of life of the Nep-people,” the well-known lawyer Z. Rikhter described the social life of the Soviet capital in the beginning of the year 1923 as follows:
In the gilded-strawberry red lounges [of the Bolshoi Theater], on the first rows of the parquet – no workers’ shirts to be seen, as it was in 1918–1920, but instead bare shoulders and the arms of the ladies decorated with expensive jewels, straight combed male partings and tail-coats. This is the picture from the pre-war and pre-revolutionary times. The public is not less luxurious than before-but at a closer look, these are not the same people as before, not the ones with a permanent subscription to the tickets to all the premiers, but new ones, from outside the town, so called nep-people and nouveaux riches. The old land-owning aristocracy and shop owners as well as the old literary-aristocratic people of Moscow are not there anymore. Only seldom, by chance, can one now meet some famous people from the old scene, from among the previous Moscow ‘nabob,’ or a once bright society lion. But how they have changed in the last five years! They have aged, got as bleak as the old curtain at the Bolshoi Theater with its muses and roses, and how they are now dressed, worse than their previous janitors and maids, wearing fine rags.
Nothing is left of the old society of Moscow, the famous Moscow tailor told me in the foyer of the Bolshoi theatre in whose salon the Moscow high society used to get its clothing made. My old customers have either emigrated or are dead. Only a few of the old Moscow elite is left and survived. Anyway, only seldom do any of the old ladies come to me in order to breathe a while in the lost paradise… To let me sew something is far too expensive for them now.
In the official register the nepmen are often “unemployed,” some are even cunning enough and try to get social benefits. And these unemployed can earn hundreds of billions. Their apartments are full of unforeseen luxury. Atlas tapestry, artistic, decorative items of design and drawings; every room has its own style. Rare products of art.74
The general critical attitude towards fashion and haute couture common in the NEP society in the 1920s was associated with luxury which had been earned by dishonest means or with nostalgia for tsarist times, and had obvious gender aspects too. The main consumers of fashion had traditionally been the well-to-do ladies from the higher echelons of society. At the same time, post-revolutionary Soviet Russia, declaring the equality of the sexes, made real progress in the area of liberating women from the slavery of housework and changing them into active members of society with equal rights, and had rather unexpectedly become the spearhead of women’s liberation in the world.
At the same time new progressive ideas appeared that had an impact on the general conceptions of fashion and culture of dress. These conceptions were closely related to the international school of thought on the scientific organization of work, housework included, and leisure time, which was popular in the USSR particularly in the 1920s. The establishment of the Society for the Scientific Organization of Everyday Life was a good example of these tendencies. In it the Soviet youth searched for reconciliation to its new, Soviet outlook starting from the premise that the new Soviet way of life must somehow find corresponding new forms in the outer appearance of men and women. In the 1920s intense disputes were waged around such seemingly trivial questions as whether a Komsomol boy could wear a necktie or a suit, or if it was really allowed for a Komsomol girl to wear a fashionable hair-do or other kinds of decorations.
In the mid-1920s, the main youth newspaper of the country, Komsomol’skaya pravda, wrote in its editorial:
Having as its ideological basis the liberation of all the elements of contemporary everyday life from all the remnants of capitalist society that still tormented it and to reform it on the tested facts of exact science and Leninism, the society sets its immediate task to cope successfully with the everyday hygienic situation, to produce a reformation of dress, furniture, bed, as well as to establish the right organization of rational leisure.75
Even though the scientific bases of hygiene might be understandable, it was certainly more problematic to see how the joining of the forces of the exact sciences and Leninism could help to reform dress.
Despite the political support they enjoyed among many radical Bolsheviks, the radical vanguard of dress reform never in practice realized their ideals to any great degree and had a very restricted impact on the mass production of clothes. This was more the result of the many practical problems caused by the extremely bad state of the whole Soviet textile and garment industry than the lack of political will. However, even though these social and cultural experiments from the 1920s had been almost totally forgotten by the beginning of the 1930s and condemned as “anti-socialist,” they were by no means totally buried and, in fact, left deep marks in the social consciousness. The Soviet ideology of fashion, at least to some extent, remained indebted to the idea that fashion as such is something excessive and alien, and even more importantly, contrary to the laws of usefulness and necessity.
Where could one possibly find the basic principles for such a democratic uniform of the working class? To solve the problem, several institutions were established at once. The Central Institute of the Garment Industry was established in 1919 with the aim of coordinating and uniting all the sewing workshops as well as creating new forms of clothes “corresponding to the conditions of hygiene, comfort, beauty and durability.”76 In 1922 the Center for the Creation of the New Soviet-or Revolutionary-Dress was opened in Moscow, and later on was turned into The Fashion Atelier of the Moscow House of Fashion Design. The famous painters Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev, Igor Emmanuilovich Grabar’, Kuz’ma Sergeyevich Petrov-Vodkin, the sculptor Vera Ignatyevna Mukhina as well as the future first director of the Fashion Atelier, Olga Dmitrievna Senicheva-Kashchenko, were among its founders.77
The names of Varvara Fedorovna Stepanova and Liubov’ Sergeyevna Popova are well known from art history. They represented the new radical proletarian aesthetics in the applied arts in general and in clothing design in particular in the early 1920s. They stood strongly for the abandonment of everything reminiscent of fashion in clothing and textile design. Their constructivist designs were guided by functionalist aesthetics. They relied on such genuine cubist devices as geometry and flatness in their vision of the dress appropriate to the New Woman.78 Their main invention, which was in line with their self-understanding as artists serving the proletarian masses instead of the individual members of the bourgeoisie, was the design of prozodezhda (production clothing). The idea of prozodezhda came from the interpretation of functionality strictly in terms of the social division of labor. It linked the comfort and functionality of every dress to a specific productive function.79 The prototypes of production clothing that Stepanova designed for the theater scene were genuine working uniforms that differed from each other depending solely on the type of work performed in them. By the mid- 1920s the constructivist designers together with the Proletkult movement had lost their political influence in the country.
One of the most famous fashion designers of those days was the former official provider of the Imperial court, Nadezhda Petrovna Lamanova (1861–1941), (Fig. 3.) who had a long career in the Soviet Union as well. She was a good friend of the French couturier Paul Poiret and had become well known for her luxurious clothes lined with golden embroidery made for the Tsarist family and the representatives of former high society (many are still preserved in the Hermitage Art Museum in St. Petersburg). Lamanova was also seriously inspired by the idea of “revolutionizing” dress. Thanks to the support given by Akeksei Maksimovich Gorky and in particular his wife Maria Andreevna Andreeva, an actress and Lamanova’s noble client, Lamanova could in 1919 with the permission of the Soviet regime organize the Artistic Atelier of Contemporary Dress, which was engaged in experimenting with the design of dress for the working masses. In 1925, in collaboration with the Soviet sculptor Mukhina, later to become famous for her art works which are often regarded as quintessential examples of socialist realism, she published the album Iskusstvo v bytu (Art in Everyday Life). It propagated the results of her dressmakers, presenting concrete projects of practical and comfortable working clothes for the workers created from simple raw materials but with real aesthetic appeal.
At the same time, Lamanova sewed clothes for the main figures of Soviet high society and world of fashion in the beginning of the 1920s, among them such figures as Lilia Yurievna Brik, Isadora Duncan and others. Arriving back in Paris from the Soviet Union, Elsa Triole, Louis Aragon’s future companion, caused a real sensation by demonstrating at the International Exhibition of Arts and Crafts in Paris in the mid-1920s a dress sewn by Lamanova and decorated with lace from Vologda region. At this time, the idea of introducing folk motifs into fashion design inspired Lamanova. She was deeply convinced that such popular motifs as hand-made textiles and decorative details (like lace or embroidery) could make fashion more democratic, synthesizing folk dress with haute couture. In the 1930s, when Lamanova was working as the head of the atelier of Mekhkombinat (Fur Enterprise) she took the opportunity, with as much enthusiasm as she had for simple dress, to design luxurious clothes from fur. These were sold abroad for foreign currency. During the 1920s and 1930s, on invitation from the main theaters of the country, she worked with stage costumes too, in practice educating a whole generation of costume milliners for the Soviet theater.80 After the radical constructivist movement in the mid-1920s Lamanova was the main theoretician of fashion in Soviet Russia. Gradually, she started to distance herself clearly from the idea of the creation of a “mass dress” suitable for all the workers as an alternative to “bourgeois dress.” Lamanova came to the conclusion that the reform of dress and design should take totally different directions, closer to the needs of the concrete consumer, and in fact promoted the maximal individualization of dress. In 1923–1924 she published articles in which she criticized the absolutization of the idea of the democratization of fashion based on the industrial mass production of clothes by claiming that such an approach ignores all distinctions and does not, for instance, pay any attention to the differences in the bodily construction of human beings. She definitely shared with the constructivists the idea that the regular fashion cycles with their ageing of fashion should be totally abandoned. She disagreed with them, however, in arguing that fashion should not be substituted with the pure functionalist principle which remained eternally the same. Instead she argued for harmony in outer appearance and the creation of an individual dress with the taste and peculiarities of an individual human being in mind. One’s dress should help one to better express one’s genuine individuality and taste.81 Even though she criticized the unnecessary cyclical changes of fashion, in another sense she did not abandon the idea of fashion completely but attempted to reform it, by adjusting it to the new political situation. Her own creations, which acted as examples worth imitating to many coming generations of Soviet fashion designers, “involved a compromising symbiosis of fashionable modernist dress and traditional ethnic decoration”82 By adding hand-made decorations like embroidery to her otherwise stylistically simple and modernist dresses she created a compromise that did not have to give up the element of representational beauty in favor of the pure productive functions of dress. Lamanova came to create an aesthetic compromise adequate to the new cultural climate in the Soviet Union after the cultural radicalism of the early 1920s. In fact, the use of ethnic motifs as decorative elements in more festive dress became a standard feature of Soviet fashion design after the Second World War. A major problem was that handmade embroidery was very labor intensive and was not suited for industrial mass production. Therefore Lamanova’s dresses were mostly sewn in ateliers as unique examples. Lamanova’s aesthetics did not solve the problem of how to produce beautiful, fashionable and cheap clothes in great quantities. Along with her other contributions, she also left this problem as a heritage to the future generations of Soviet designers and planners.
Aer the Second World War, the name of Lamanova, who died in 1941, as well as her theoretical constructions, became a subject of pride in the Soviet history of culture. They were taught to the young designers and studied in order to better understand the concept of Soviet fashion. Lamanova’s student and follower, the designer Fekla Antonovna Gorelenkova, who had worked at Lamanova’s atelier before the revolution, was appointed the head of the Department of Female Light (that is, indoor) Clothing in the recently organized All-Union House of Fashion Design in Moscow in 1949.
Despite their critique of traditional “bourgeois” fashion, in practice the leading Bolsheviks, who often came from educated families, never wholly denied its attractive sides. Many famous activists of the revolutionary movement followed fashion closely and allowed themselves its pleasures, including Inessa Fedorovna Armand, whom V.I. Lenin himself adored. We have already mentioned Gorky’s wife, the actress Andreeva who protected Lamanova’s talents before the new regime. Even though another famous revolutionary female figure, Larissa Mikhailovna Reisner, is best known as the “Red commissar,” her attractiveness and ability to dress with style are often mentioned in her contemporaries’ memoirs. Because of Vsevolod Vital’evich Vishnevskii’s idealized picture of her in his “Optimistic Tragedy” she is best remembered as the “commissar in the leather jacket” with a revolver in hand…83
Many admiring words have also been written about Aleksandra Mikhai – lovna Kollontai, a tsarist general’s daughter who became a revolutionary and the first female ambassador in world history, the official representative of the Soviet Union in Sweden. Kollontai, who has gone down in history as a feminist propagator of “free love,” was always well and fashionably dressed. The wife of the Soviet Prime Minister Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov, Polina Semenovna Zhemchuzhina, was more closely than anyone else connected to Soviet fashion. In the 1930s and 1940s she acted as the deputy People’s Commissar of Light Industry, the People’s Commissar of the Fish Industry and the organizer and director of the Soviet perfume industry, Glavparfumer. She was a self-evident member of the artistic council of the Moscow House of Fashion Design. According to the memoirs of her niece, she even asked for a manicure on her death bed.84
e living conditions in the homes of many Bolshevik leaders who had become used to domestic comfort before the Revolution were often far from the ideals of revolutionary asceticism. In his memoirs, Belyi koridor, the poet Vladislav Felitsianovich Khodasevich, who was a regular visitor at the homes of the Soviet elite, expressed his surprise when faced with the material opulence at the Kamenevs’ and Lunacharskiis’:
“In those days the Soviet ladies were eager for luster. They dressed at Lamanova’s, patronized proletarian art, quarreled about cars and led salons…”85
He emphasized the generally prevailing mixture of the “old” and the “new” in the everyday lives of the representatives of the Soviet elite, in particular among its female half.
In the 1930s, the Soviet nomenklatura distinguished itself clearly from the ordinary citizens as far as their material provisioning and the availability of fashionable imported clothes were concerned. Recently published documents from the interrogation of the Soviet ocials arrested by the NKVD in the end of the 1930s bear witness to the real material achievements of some high profile gures. For instance, the report on the search of the house of Deputy People’s Commissar (Minister) of the NKVD, Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda, in 1937, preserved as an attachment to his interrogation, makes it clear that, in addition to having a right to a car with a chauffeur, Yagoda had bought a private car and a motor cycle with a side car. He also had a private film camera and a collection of films. His private clothes closet included, in addition to a great number of shirts, 21 overcoats and 22 suits, most of them of foreign make. He also had a collection of 1230 bottles of old, exclusive wines; and he collected coins, weapons, smoking pipes and a cigarette holder, antiques and rare tableware.86 According to numerous witnesses, the children of the Kremlin leaders dressed well and fashionably in the 1930s among themselves, being careful, however, not to advertise their material achievements openly in front of the “ordinary audience.” Their parents kept a close eye on them and made sure that they observed the rules of “Kremlin etiquette.”
The novel ideas of the first half of the 1920s regarding the new proletarian fashion, and even more the doctrine of the individuality of design and construction of clothes, were quite utopian for a starving and ruined country which almost totally lacked any modern garment industry. The majority of the population simply had nothing to wear. Under these conditions, the task of providing the population more or less immediately with at least the minimal amounts of necessary clothing was deemed to be impossible to ful l without the establishment of large garment factories and the industrial mass production of relatively good quality and cheap clothes. The reasons for favoring industrial mass production were not only dictated by necessity; ideological considerations played a role too. As is evidentin recently declassi ed records, the Soviet leaders were eager to follow the, in their minds, successful example of American standardized industrial mass production as the most effective way to solve the problems of consumption in their country too.87 This ideal of standardized, industrial mass production preserved its central role in the Soviet economic policy of growth until the very end of the Soviet Union. At the same time the Soviet government, however, kept on actively promoting and financially supporting state owned fashion ateliers and the availability of custom-made clothes to the population until the fall of socialism.
Despite many progressive ideas about the new proletarian or Soviet fashion and the consequent radical experiments with dress, in reality the Soviet population, consisting overwhelmingly of peasants, continued to live their lives following the traditions of their grandparents. Just as before the Revolution, the majority of the population could not afford to buy industrially made clothes and most people sewed clothes for their families themselves. The traditional ethics combined with the rough conditions of life did not leave much space for fashion in its modern meaning. When not even basic needs can be properly satisfied, the social space for fashion undoubtedly gets narrower. In addition, a patriarchal conception prevailed in the social consciousness of the population in the 1920s and 1930s, according to which fashion was almost totally a female phenomenon and, even more concretely, a part of the festive recreation of unmarried girls. Married women with children and a household of their own had nothing to do with fashion, even less so after they had become “old women” upon turning 30. Even they could be beautifully dressed on some particular special occasions if they could afford it, but the style and cut of their clothes was traditional and not open to the caprices and rapid changes of fashion. Beauty in the form of minor decorations and trimmings on practical clothes was quite another thing.
The 1930s: The Reanimation of Traditional Fashion
In the end of the 1920s the question of the “mass fashion” of the victorious proletariat became a question of great social importance. The circle of the consumers of fashionable clothing remained very limited. The fashion designers and milliners serviced, in addition to the nepmen, the Soviet cinema and theater, which were on the rise at the time, as well as the rather few state organizations, like the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs, who ordered their designs. It was no secret that almost all the leading Soviet specialists in the world of fashion were from among “people of the past,” specialists and professionals from pre-revolutionary Russia. In the end of the 1920s when the NEP came to an end and the state decided to take the trade and consumption of clothes under more direct control they faced hard times once again. The subsequent politics of the “great leap” forward in industrialization, collectivization and in cultural politics was followed by the propaganda of asceticism and communal living, militant atheism and the condemnation of all forms of individualism. All private enterprises, including hairdressers, small shops, restaurants, fashion journals and ateliers were closed. Only state enterprises were allowed to operate according to the new order. Even such a famous designer as Lamanova, who had succeeded in winning the trust of the new power after having spent some months after the Revolution in prison as a “non-working element,” or an “exploiter,” was stripped of her citizen’s rights and labeled as “disenfranchised” again because in the 1920s she had employed wage laborers in her sewing workshop.
It is evident from memoirs that after the end of the NEP and the consequent closing down of the private ateliers in the end of the 1920s even the members of the Soviet elite had problems getting their clothes made. In the beginning of the 1930s, for instance, Galina Sergeevna Kravchenko, an aspiring actress and Lev Borisovich Kamenev’s young daughter-in-law, visited the elite atelier belonging to the People’s Comissar of Foreign Affairs on the Kuznetskii most in Moscow. Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Sergeevna Alliluyeva, was a regular customer in the same atelier.88
The situation changed first with the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the country in the 1930s, including the opening of new and reopening of old textile and garment factories. Designers and pattern makers again became sought-after professionals. It became evident that the country needed to educate new cadres to these professions. During the first Five Year Plans in the late 1920s and early 1930s the big garment conglomerates and factories established their own artistic and construction workshops which started to work out new colors for textiles and new clothing designs. They became important centers of the professional experience of design. However, the strictly applied character of their work seriously restricted the creativity of the artist who had, above all, to comply with the demands of mass production in general and with the real, and often very limited, concrete possibilities of the factory and its workers as well.
The main factor that made the issue of clothing design in the beginning of the 1930s particularly pressing was the serious shortage of cheap industrially made clothes and the low income levels of the population. In 1930–1935, all the state-produced clothes and shoes were distributed according to the strict norms of rationing, just like bread and other food items.89 Clothes and shoes were relatively expensive and bought mostly out of necessity and not because they went out of fashion. It was characteristic that when the general system of obligatory education was introduced in 1930 the main obstacle which prevented children from attending school was their lack of shoes and clothes, particularly during the winter. Compared to many more prosperous countries of the West, space for fashion was quite limited in the Soviet Union.
The situation started to change in the middle of the 1930s with the gradual rise in the living standards of the population, in particular among its rapidly increasing urban segment. The processes of urbanization and industrialization actively opened up the field for the impact of urban culture, including fashion. In addition, Stalin’s famous slogan “life has become better, life has become more joyful” (1935) suggested that ordinary citizens should be able and were encouraged to feel in their own private lives the achievements of the first Five Year Plans, to learn how to enjoy life in their socialist fatherland and even get some satisfaction out of it. Citizens’ dedication to the cause of socialism did not only demand sacrifice from them. They had a right to expect some real rewards from it too. This inevitably led to the diversi cation of the tastes and needs of the citizens. Part of the new political course in the mid-1930s, oen referred to as NeoNEP, consisted of the reanimation, on the initiative and under the control of the state, of the system of fashion, the publication of fashion journals and other periodicals, and the establishments of exemplary state department stores and the fashion ateliers attached to them in the big cities. The first Soviet House of Fashion Design was opened in Moscow on Kuznetskii most street in 1934.90 Lamanova’s niece and former pupil, Nadezhda Sergeevna Makarova, became the first director of this new house. The houses of fashion design existed side by side with the more ordinary system of both state owned and cooperative small tailors’ and seamstresses’ ateliers which sewed custom-made clothes.
In the middle of the 1930s, the question was raised of the specialization of fashion design in the garment industry and the creation of a unified system of designing fashionable clothes in the whole country. The house of fashion design in the capital city, which originally designed clothes only for the enterprises of the Moscow Sewing Company, was reorganized a few years later into the Central House of Fashion Design (Tsentralnyi Dom modeleior TsDM); regional houses of fashion design were opened at the same time in Leningrad and in other big cities at the end of the 1930s to satisfy the needs of local industry for new designs. All houses of fashion design were under the People’s Commissar of Light Industry and designed clothes for industrial mass production. However, the establishment of a centralized system of fashion design was not completed before the war due to, among other reasons, internal competition among the different organizations in the branch. The big industrial enterprises and conglomerates were not the only ones that had pretensions of designing their own clothes; the organizations of trade also had their own interests in the matter. The influential People’s Commissar (Minister) of Trade, Anastas Ivanovich Mikoyan, actively and successfully lobbied for the interests of trade. He claimed that since trade was closest to the actual consumers it knew their demands better than industry or the planning office.
By February 1935, 11 exemplary department stores opened in the big cities of the USSR, all aiming at becoming leaders of fashion in the country. The Central Department Store, TsUM, which opened in Moscow in the same building next to the Bolshoi Theater which had hosted the famous pre-revolutionary store of Muir and Merilees, was typical in this respect. In 1934 its new fashion atelier, which took orders to sew clothing according to the individual measures of the customer made altogether 4500 garments in the product category “dresses and suits.” According to the reports of its directors a good example of the growing interest in fashionable clothing among the Muscovites was the fact that during an ordinary weekday about a hundred customers turned to it for its services. However, because of the limited number of workers it could only take 12–15 orders per day. It was easy to understand that the whole problem of good quality and fashionable clothing could not be solved with the help of such relatively small ateliers. It was also well known that many garments produced in the factories for sale were not at all fashionable and did not meet any demand. Therefore, the designers from the TsUM atelier started to design their own original patterns. As early as 1934, TsUM made a deal with some local factories, which started to adapt its designs into industrial production. For instance, in 1935, a whole factory of children’s wear was attached to the atelier. As the director of TsUM reported, they received for sale “about half of all their linen from this factory.”91
Alongside the design of its own clothes and their adaptation to the needs of the garment factories of the capital region, TsUM actively promoted the idea of organizing its own production units. Its designers now worked on three fronts at the same time: they made patterns for their own atelier, for industrial production and for production in small series by their own production unit. They sold their fashionable designs at TsUM and they were said to be in great demand.92
The production units at the big department stores, referred to as industrial conglomerates (promkombinaty), themselves products of the 1930s, independently produced small series of clothes (from overcoats to linen) which were in high demand and also had a staff of their own designers. ey could, at some stage, without doubt have presented a real alternative to the bigger garment factories working under the People’s Commissariat of the Light Industry. They opened up again after the war, showing their vitality even under the new conditions of Soviet commercial trade.93 However, from the mid-1950s onwards, their role started to diminish. Many experienced designers and pattern makers le them in order to start work at the newly opened Houses of Fashion Design at the Ministry of Light Industry. For instance, in the middle of the 1960s some specialists were invited from the production unit of the department store Moskva to work in the All-Union House of Fashion Design on Kuznetskii most street. The small production units continued to produce clothes even in the 1960s and 1970s but their share in the total production of clothes in the USSR, which was small from the beginning, drastically diminished in later years. Of all the big department stores in Moscow only the State Department Store (GUM), in operation since 1953, had a production unit of its own aer the war.
ese production units were good at turning out small series. They could change their product lines rapidly according to changing demand. As a rule, they decided independently what items and how much they would produce. On the other hand, even they depended heavily on the central state organizations for raw materials, machines and tools, etc. The units’ fashionable products were mainly sold at the unit’s own department store, which gave an extra stimulus to find a market for them. At the same time, the garment factories of the Ministry of Light Industry that engaged in mass production had, as a rule, better machines, enjoyed priority in receiving raw materials before others, and had a much higher productivity and effectiveness than the small workshops of the promkombinates. It was economically more effective for the state to provide the big garment factories with financial aid with their more rapid turnover of production which filled the market more effectively with good clothes. Thus they were heavily prioritized in the 1930s and 1950s. Moreover, department stores naturally existed only in the larger cities, out of reach of the majority of the population living in the villages. Both the logic of the central planning on the All-Union level and limited financial resources led to the heavy concentration of clothing production in big production units. The authorities put all their hopes in the further specialization and professionalization of the fashion designers in accordance with the needs of mass industrial production.
When the Communist Party and the state increasingly allowed their citizens to realize their dreams of the good life and even actively encouraged them in their efforts, the political leaders could hardly have imagined, first, how badly society was in need of the indulgence, and second, that people did not necessarily get their ideals of a good life and well-being from the foggy ideals of the Communist future-or from the uniform-like reform dress – but rather from the “cursed past” which they had seen with their own eyes. Those who had nothing to lose tried to achieve everything-as soon as possible.
To dress attractively and fashionably-once possible in Russia only for a tiny well-to-do part of society-became a sign of the “socialist culture” in the mid-1930s. On the 15th of September, 1934, the newspaper of the Central Committee of the Communist party, Pravda, reported on the establishment of the Fashion Atelier at the Electric Factory (Elektrozavod) in Moscow, which opened huge new vistas to the workers of dressing themselves according to the most exclusive fashion standards. The article, published in millions of copies, created an outcry among its readers with clear features of envy. The director of the factory Magnezit in the Urals (Chelyabinskii region) wrote to the Prime Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, that his five thousand workers would also like to have good raw materials for their suits, to be able to get tailor-made fashionable overcoats and shoes, or to dress their wives and children in fur.94 Access to fashion was thus used as an incentive to promote labor productivity and to attract a more competent labor force to factories.
e symbols and style of the good life had not changed much since 1917. Almost all Soviet novelties turned out to be examples of the “happily” forgotten old. The growth of the new Soviet chain of ner restaurants and cafes, the beginning of the mass production of perfumes and cosmetics, champagne, chocolate and other similar items quite obviously did not satisfy any primary needs but were closely associated in the public mind with the luxury and well-being of the previous ruling elite. The state actively promoted the establishment of fashion ateliers at the factories, the showcase department stores, and other locations. It also opened a system of ordinary ateliers in the mid-1930s as a “sign of social cultivation” and regarded custom-made clothes as the “norm of life.” This was a remarkable step in many ways. First, in practice, if not in theory, the state took the first steps towards the legitimization of more individual expressions of taste. Second, it gave the citizens a free choice: either to buy an industrially ready-made garment in a shop or order a custom made dress from the atelier or-and this was without doubt the most common option in the 1930s particularly in the countryside – to sew their clothes themselves. The second alternative was certainly slightly more expensive but usually of better quality too. Even though strongly prioritizing the industrial mass production of clothes, the Soviet state simultaneously had an amazingly positive relationship to custom made clothes and hand work.95
The 1930s mainly reanimated the main symbols of traditional fashion as well as helped to invigorate the idea of fashion as a normal part of Soviet life. Even if not overtly enthusiastic about fashion – after all, it did not really fit into the system of the planned economy – the Soviet State still acknowledged it as a legitimate part of the society by establishing a whole system of organizations somehow engaged in fashion design, its propagation and distribution. At the same time, the rapid urbanization of the country created positive conditions for the increasing numbers of fashion conscious Soviet consumers.
The Impact of War on the Soviet Fashion Design and Industry
It is hard to imagine any other country in which fashion was created under such exceptional conditions as the USSR.96 The numerous social cataclysms that the country experienced undoubtedly left their marks on the way in which society and the state related to fashionable and festive dress, thus also influencing the birth of the Soviet fashion industry. Just as the country started to recover from the tragic consequences of the forced collectivization of agriculture, with millions of deaths during the famine of 1932–1933, the threat of war changed priorities again.
The fashion ateliers and houses, as well as all the other institutes dealing with the beauti cation of the body, were closed during the war. Instead of civilian clothing the factories produced uniforms and military boots. The war had a clear impact on the outer appearance of the Soviet men and women. About half a million women served in the acting army alone, exchanging their fashionable civilian clothes for uniforms.97 Hundreds of thousands of young girls who left for the front directly from the school bench, simply exchanging their school uniforms for military ones, hardly had any time to learn to dress like women at all. Millions of women who had remained behind the enemy lines had to work like men in heavy and often dirty work thus filling in for their husbands and fathers fighting on the front. The war made women more independent as they took over many traditionally male professions en masse, changing the traditional division of labor between the genders. Trousers, quilted jackets and short haircuts characterized female fashion in the war. Work clothing and the elements of military uniform – concrete anti-fashion – became the norm. This had a great impact on the post-war trends of fashion in the USSR as well as in other countries. (Fig. 4.)
It is understandable that, among the Soviet generation who lived their formative years in between and during the two wars, fashion did not in general enjoy a high priority. It was not something that could give meaning to one’s life. The Soviet philosopher and aesthetician Karl Moiseevich Kantor expressed this typical attitude in the beginning of the 1970s with the following words: “As if we would ever have any time to get engaged in fashion in earnest and pay any serious attention to it.”98 The great majority of the Soviet youth, who had by then grown up in the more prosperous post-war years, obviously had another opinion, which could at times lead to intense conflicts between the generations which, however, the Soviet leaders never openly recognized. One could speak of a sublimation of the tendencies of fashion in Soviet society until the early 1960s which led to a hidden suppressed accumulation of the demand for fashionable dress. The age old social control of decency and good manners, exercised both by the elders and the Party organs, started to give way to a more liberal cultural atmosphere during Khruschchev’s “thaw” and the more prosperous conditions under Brezhnev. These changes became very visible in the special and slightly weird interest in Western fashion and in the high prestige enjoyed by all imported goods among the Soviet population.
See endnotes and bibliography at source.
Chapter 2 (38-56) 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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