Fashion East: The Spectre That Haunted Socialism

In this groundbreaking book, Djurdja Bartlett shows that the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism - which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary - eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past.The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores - mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. Illus., 70 in color. 300p.