The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka                  headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this                  groundbreaking book, 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. The                  state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle                  class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress                  of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany,                  Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines,                  etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own                  interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she                  suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the                  socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous                  first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism                  until the end.

FashionEast: the spectre that haunted socialism PDF

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