Official Socialist Dress

127Let Them Wear Beige

Fashion Theory, Volume 8, Issue 2, pp. 127–164Reprints available directly from the Publishers.Photocopying permitted by licence only.© 2004 Berg. Printed in the United Kingdom.

Djurdja Bartlett

Djurdja Bartlett is researchingfor a PhD on Fashion, theSpectre that HauntedSocialism at the LondonCollege of Fashion. From 1992to 1999 she was lecturer at theUniversity of Zagreb, onCultural Studies and theSociology of Fashion. She hasedited a book Body inTransition (1999) and coeditedthe book Fashion: History,Sociology and Theory (2002).

Let Them WearBeige: The Petit-bourgeois Worldof Official SocialistDressFrom its very beginning in 1917, socialism had a stormy and hostilerelationship with fashion. In Bolshevik Russia, Western style dress wasattacked as a bourgeois gendered practice. The Constructivist artistsproposed radical changes to dress and textile design and wanted to breakwith all preexisting dress codes. They tried to impose a totally new formof socialist dress: functional, simple, and hygienic. But in the poverty-stricken and industrially backward Russia of the early 1920s Constructiv-ist ideas on the total change of man, everyday life, and its objects provedto be highly Utopian and ultimately unsuccessful.

In the mid-1930s, Stalinism dealt in a radically different way with areality that was still burdened by poverty and the rationing of consumer

128 Djurdja Bartlett

goods. The regime invented a new parallel and mythical reality, whichwas promoted through the new Stalinist mass media of magazines, novels,and films. In 1935, fashion was officially confirmed as part of Stalin’s massculture by the opening of the House of Fashion in Moscow. While theearly Bolsheviks had rejected even the word “fashion,” and had insistedon functional and undecorated clothing, Stalinism, in a sharp ideologicalturn, granted fashion a highly representational role. Through fashion, theregime reintroduced conservative aesthetics and traditional femininity.Houses of Fashion were instituted in the other capitals of the SovietRepublics, establishing a controlled centralization inside the field ofclothes production. In this centrally planned system, which did notrecognize the market, the main privilege became access to goods, anaccessibility that was hierarchically structured. For the masses, good-quality clothes and fashion accessories were either too expensive orunattainable. In fact, Stalinist representational dress existed only on thepages of two new luxurious fashion publications, the monthly FashionJournal (Zhurnal mod) and the biannual Fashions of the Seasons (Modelisezona), and in the special shops meant for the socialist elite.

The centrally organized field of fashion production was never aband-oned in Russia, and after 1948 it was also politically imposed on the EastEuropean socialist countries, regardless of their differing, and sometimeshigher, technical and stylistic levels in the design and production of clothes.The East European socialist regimes embraced the early Bolshevik ide-ology, and officially rejected Western fashion. It was claimed that func-tional, simple, and classless socialist dress would derive from seriousscientific and technical research, and that such a dress would fulfill allthe sartorial needs of working women. In practice the clothes that wereavailable in the shops were of poor quality and bad, unfashionable design.

In the following decades, the East European socialist regimes’ relation-ship to clothes and fashion continued to be influenced by political changesin the Soviet Union. A new ideological turn took place after Khrushchevaffirmed his rule in 1956, and attacked excessive Stalinist aesthetics.Leaving the worst practices of Stalinist isolationism behind, Khrushchevopened Russia towards the West. In the late 1950s, official attitudestowards Western fashion mellowed in both Russia and East Europeansocialist countries. After decades of rejection, the official encounter withWestern fashion was a confusing process. With neither tradition normarket, and aspiring to control fashion changes inside their centralizedfashion systems, the socialist regimes could neither keep up with norembrace Western fashion trends. By the end of the 1950s, the officialversion of socialist fashion relapsed back to conservative sartorial expres-sions, and practices of traditional femininity. The return to previouslydespised bourgeois dress practices bore witness to the socialist regimes’failure to produce a genuine socialist fashion.

In this article I offer an interpretation of that encounter betweensocialism and Western fashion, which resulted in the sartorial pheno-


menon that I call “official socialist dress.” Historically, the process tookplace between 1958 and 1968, and it was connected to the creation ofthe new socialist middle class, which was at that time being engineeredby the socialist regimes. The aesthetics of official socialist dress duringthe Khrushchev period in Russia, and from the late 1950s in the CentralEuropean socialist countries, was officially informed by simple andmoderate lines. I call that conventional style, officially imposed uponsartorial codes in the 1950s and 1960s, “socialist good taste.”

Just as in Stalinist times, official socialist dress in the decade from thelate 1950s on had little to do with everyday reality. Queues, shortages,and unsatisfactory supply in the shops continued, confirming in differingdegrees the respective regimes’ domination of both the time and theconsumption of their citizens. Official socialist dress was an ideologicalconstruct, a discourse channeled through the state-owned media. Itdemonstrated all the perversities of the socialist economies, which re-nounced both the laws of the market and individual desires. While theofficial socialist fashion was an ideological construct unaffected by thepoor quality of clothes in the shops, women used a whole range ofunofficial channels, from self-made clothes to the black market, privatefashion salons and networks of connections to obtain desired clothes intheir everyday life. Although significant differences did exist between thesocialist countries in their everyday fashion practices, they were obliteratedin the mythical world of official socialist dress.

This article is based on my research on various phenomena of socialistand post-socialist fashion, carried out in the Czech Republic, Croatia,Hungary and Russia. There I introduce five specific ideal-type-dresses toexplain certain historical or contemporary sartorial practices: the Utopiandress, the official socialist dress, the everyday socialist dress, the subversivedress, and the post-socialist dress. Presented here is a part of my analysison the official socialist dress’s highly ideological theories and practices.

Dressing Up the Socialist Middle Classes

We have repeatedly written that the choice of clothes should followthe basic rule: time of day and particular circumstances. During theday, for example, it is not appropriate to pay visits or receive guestsin a smart evening dress. On that occasion, a strictly elegant daydress is appropriate: of short length, high or just slightly openneckline, with short or long sleeves. . . . Such a dress is not servedby loads of jewellery, it is better to restrict oneself to one piece: abrooch, a hairpin or a bracelet. Shoes, hats and gloves should bematched with such a day dress. Of course, everything should becoordinated according to the colour. Let us repeat: a dress that youwear during the working day should be modest and restrained inappearance. Matinees, parties at 1pm, cocktails and “a la furshet”


parties from 5 till 8 pm, require a smarter day dress and a littleelegant hat, which you are not supposed to take off.

Evening dress, made from an expressive and decorative fabricthat is not worn during the day, is necessary for grand receptions,theatre premieres and gala concerts, especially if they happen after8pm. Although not necessary, the evening dress is characterized bya lower neckline, short sleeves and a long skirt. Silk or lacy glovescan be added to such a dress; their length depends on the length ofthe sleeves: the shorter the sleeve, the longer the gloves, and theother way round. A small elegant handbag accompanies evening-wear. Light open shoes with high heels, or medium heels for olderwomen, serve those occasions; shoes can be made from silk, broc-ade, or from golden or silver leather. Day shoes are not appropriatefor eveningwear. It is allowed to embellish eveningwear with jewel-lery. Here, a sense of measure is welcome, as always (Maskulii1958).

This article, published in the Soviet Fashion Journal in 1958, reflectedthe regimes’ urge to dress up their newly installed middle classes in civilianclothes. The strong pedagogical content demonstrated that the newsocialist middle class was composed mainly from those with only a limitedknowledge of culture and of its diversified practices. As the official fashionpublication, through which the system’s policies on fashion were chan-neled, the Fashion Journal was quite clear about the regimes’ intentionsin its editorial note “Clothes for Going Out and Formal Occasions,”which preceded the article itself. The magazine exploited the usual tacticof the socialist press in promoting new state policies: readers’ letters.Claiming that their editorial team had received a number of letters withqueries about the proper way to dress for going out and for formalpurposes, the Fashion Journal (Maskulii 1958) suggested “a set of rulesthat have been established long ago, and are accepted almost everywhere.”They ended by stressing: “We recommend our readers to follow them.”

The editorial also drew a precise profile of the strata which needed to dressup: “Naturally, these questions interest our readers but, in a broader sense,they also appeal to certain groups of the Soviet people who attend officialand government events on public holidays, who meet foreign visitors atinternational competitions and academic congresses, who go to partiesat embassies and consulates, and attend theatre premieres, and, especially,family celebrations—weddings, birthday dinners and high-school gradu-ation parties.”1 This article, and numerous similar articles that appearedin official socialist women’s magazines in Soviet Russia and CentralEuropean socialist countries during the same period, emphasized theinstitution of everyday culture for the middle classes that the respectiveregimes had created in order to legitimate and support the system.

Observing political and social changes in the socialist countries in the1960s, Ken Jowitt (1992: 99–100) argued that the relationship between


regime and society was changing from domination through terror todomination informed by symbolic manipulation. Jowitt argued that theregimes were in the process of creating a new middle class that deservedideological and organizational recognition (p. 102). It is important todistinguish between the fashion practices of the small and powerfulNomenklatura and the new professional elites that emerged in the 1960sto form the new middle class. These new professional elites were a muchlarger and socially diversified social group than the Nomenklatura. In thenew social stratification in the 1960s its members spread out at differentlevels in society, both professionally and hierarchically. The developmentof official socialist fashion was connected to the development of this newsocialist middle class. Fashion had been a dangerous bourgeois practiceuntil the late 1950s when that politically informed repositioning of socialclasses began to take place. It was only in the 1960s, when the regimesno longer needed support for the revolution but for the maintenance ofthe system, that fashion was introduced as one of the policies designedto depoliticize the population.

Analyzing the birth of official socialist dress in the late 1950s and1960s, a series of tacit deals can be traced between the respective socialistregimes and their nascent middle classes. In Russia, Khrushchev inheritedStalin’s middle classes,2 but from the end of the 1950s he tried to reshapethem so that they fitted into his vision of the new modernist society. InHungary, Czechoslovakia, and Croatia,3 on the other hand, discarded anddespised after 1948, bourgeois and petit-bourgeois strata not only existedin real life, but even more so inside the official socialist subconsciousnessas an eternally threatening Other. As an internalized negative social entity,the bourgeoisie contributed to the identity of the new socialist middleclass. But the values of the former bourgeois classes were distorted dueto the processes of deculturation and reculturation that they had endureduntil the 1960s. Their dress codes had become dated and displaced becausethe field of their fashion production had been officially abolished andreplaced by the centrally planned production of clothes.

The bourgeois sartorial traditions that survived acted in an alienenvironment. The Central European socialist regimes allowed the exist-ence of some very exclusive fashion salons belonging to the pre-WorldWar II tradition, which catered for both the old disempowered prewarelite and the new ruling elite.4 Those fashion salons took different guisesin different socialist countries. In Czechoslovakia they were all national-ized after 1948, but the two most famous fashion houses Podolska andRosenbaum were renamed Eva and Styl, and still discreetly practiced theprewar craftsmanship that guaranteed quality and luxury. In the differentand more liberal climate of postwar Croatia, privately owned fashionsalons were officially recognized, but they were legally restricted, as thefashion designer in the role of owner was allowed to employ only fivepeople. The most prestigious among these Zagreb-based fashion salons,such as Zuzi Jelinek, Tilda Stepinska, and Terka Toncic, could not there-


fore develop into proper fashion houses. Zuzi Jelinek tried to establishher fashion house in New York in 1959 (Figure 1). Although she enjoyedenthusiastic and professional support from the American side, her projectfailed because she could not produce her clothes in sufficient quantitiesfor the American market.5 In Budapest, the most famous private fashionsalon was owned by Klára Rothschild, who produced completely Western-ized luxurious fashion shows each season. Her good connections, bothwith the Hungarian ruling party and in the West, enabled her to travelabroad and obtain top-quality fabrics. Nusi Arató delivered conservative,good quality suits for the new ruling elite from her Budapest salon. LadyZsóka had to leave her high-class Conchita Szalon, but she continued todeliver Western-influenced dresses for domestic and foreign clientele fromless prestigious premises.6

Figure 1The American model SuzyParker wearing clothes by theCroatian designer Zuzi Jelinek.Globus (Zagreb), no. 2, 1959,p. 41.


Those exclusive fashion salons survived throughout the socialist period,but their presence was very discreet till the end of the 1950s. Althoughthey perceived themselves as bastions of proper bourgeois values, and keptup appearances with seasonal fashion shows, their dresses became gradu-ally dated in an environment that was neither creatively nor economicallyencouraging. But the official reconceptualization of fashion broughtprivate fashion salons to the attention of the socialist media. The previ-ously rejected bourgeois practices and bourgeois dress codes were sud-denly recognized, but recoded to suit socialist modernity and serve thesocialist middle classes. The respective leaderships tried to legitimize theirrule by gradually taking politics out of everyday life and replacing it bycontrolled consumption practices.7 Socialist fashion was one of them.

From 1960 onward, fashion was politically legitimated in the form ofrational practice, and entered the body of approved cultural capital. Thesocialist regimes acknowledged fashion when mass culture and massconsumption could not be held back. As the development of mass culturebrought the Cold War race to a new phase, the regimes needed a loyalmiddle class that would mimic advanced and sophisticated everydayrituals of their Western counterparts. The new official discourse recog-nized the existing private fashion salons as a useful medium to presentfashion practices that suited the socialist slow flow of time: classical,elegant, timeless, and possessing a tradition that socialism suddenlydesired. Seasonal shows by exclusive fashion houses, such as Eva and Styl,were regularly reported in the Czech media. They were no longer perceivedas a decadent manifestation of bourgeois culture but as a sign of a civilizedlifestyle.8 Klára Rothschild’s biannual fashion shows (Figure 2), that tookplace in luxurious spaces such as the Budapest restaurant Gundel, com-manded a lot of space in the Hungarian press in the 1960s. In 1959, theCroatian picture magazine Globus introduced a new weekly feature aboutthe owners of domestic fashion salons promoting them as genuine stars.In one feature called “Diors Among Us” (Stosic 1959) the Croatianfashion designer Tilda Stepinska (Figure 3) explained that while she wasalways inspired by French haute couture, she only chose ideas suitablefor “our conditions.” Who were her customers? Like Christian Dior, whodressed the French upper class, the Croatian “Dior” catered for thesocialist elite. In that column, she especially mentioned that she dressed“women who held high political office in the country, or represented itabroad, and therefore needed elegant and functional clothes” (p. 40). Itwas obviously not contradictory to publish such a statement in a massmagazine at the end of the 1950s. It was all part of the new politics ofstyle.

The fashion shows put on by the politically neutralized and economic-ally incapacitated private fashion salons were, for a while, granted a rolein promoting the phenomenon of fashion. But the socialist regimes sooninstituted a series of their own annual fashion congresses between socialistcountries, at which new socialist fashion trends were proposed and


decided. Socialist fashion meetings had actually started in 1949. OnlyCzechoslovakia and East Germany took part in the first two, and Hungaryjoined the third one.9 As the need for official socialist dress grew by theend of the 1950s, those official fashion shows were transformed intoambitious fashion congresses that took place each year in a differentsocialist capital. Each participating country prepared a collection ofprototypes. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union took a very active and oftencontrolling role in those annual fashion gatherings, imposing its practiceof centrally controlled fashion trends.10 The Soviet Working Womanreported that the six socialist countries took part in the 8th FashionCongress, held in Moscow in July 1957, and that each of them presenteda collection of exactly fifty-three models meant for different purposes.Fashion professionals from Poland, Hungary, Romania, East Germany,Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union met to exchange experiences, and aninternational jury chose models for the unique collection that each countrywould put into mass production.11 The glamorous official socialist versionof fashion existed as an ideological construct undisturbed by the shortagesand poor quality of clothes available in everyday life. In the officialdiscourse, the Soviet Union dictated socialist fashion trends, although inreality Soviet women spent an enormous amount of time in queues forPolish lingerie, Czech textiles or Yugoslav pullovers.

The unity of the participating socialist countries in choosing futurefashion trends was continually stressed in magazine reports on thosecongresses in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s.12 The result wasthe uniqueness of an “elegant and contemporary style, which did not copywestern fashion.”13 But what sort of style did that isolationism and fear

Figure 2Klára Rothschild Fashion Showheld in October 1960 inBudapest (reprinted by thekind permission of the CentralEuropean University Press fromGero and Peto 1999).


of competition with the West produce in the end? Just as the bourgeoisieitself was constitutive of the identity of the new socialist middle class asan internalized negative identity, so the bourgeois dress was constitutiveof the official socialist dress in the late 1950s. The official fashion con-gresses between socialist countries, at which the official socialist dress waspromoted, were an orgy of luxurious fabrics and extravagant cuts. Modelsparaded up and down the catwalk in ball gowns with ruffles and longwide skirts, taffeta evening coats with huge collars, and low-neck cocktaildresses. Those outfits were accessorized with excessive amounts of cost-ume jewelry and high heels. The poster that advertized the MoscowFashion Congress in 1957 showed a slim model in a long evening dresswith train, accesorized with a stole wrapped around her shoulders andstretching down the gown to sweep the floor. Reporting on the fashioncongress held in Leipzig in 1961, the Russian Fashion Journal quotedpraises to Soviet fashion from the East German daily National Zeitung:

The House of Fashion has shown a lot of fabulous overcoats andensembles, restricted in colour (mainly beige), and daily dressesmade of wool with beautiful rose patterns. Spectators were espe-cially charmed by the dress “Russian Song” (bright red roses onthe dark blue background), inspired by Russian folk motives, andaccompanied by a scarf with a fringe. Another dress with a patternof golden-yellow roses on a green background was accompaniedby a green overcoat. A black astrakhan coat with a grey mink collar,an astrakhan jacket with cuffs in white mink, and a sport overcoatin white lambskin demonstrated the abilities of the Soviet furindustry.14

Figure 3Models by the Croatiandesigner Tilda Stepinski.Globus (Zagreb), no. 15,October 11 1959, p. 41.


In his book Mythologies, Roland Barthes (1976: 139) argued that“ideologically, everything that is not bourgeois is obliged to borrow fromthe bourgeoisie.”15 Similar to evening wear, day dresses and suits atsocialist fashion congresses demonstrated that bourgeois dress codes wereborrowed and mimicked very seriously. There was nothing casual inofficial socialist day wear. Serious ensembles of overcoats and matchingdresses were accompanied by matching shoes and handbags, hats andgloves. Following the needs of the newly instituted socialist middle classes,official socialist dress was born, and aesthetically expressed through a stylethat I will call “socialist good taste.”

From Grandiose to Pretty: Socialist Good Taste

There are different approaches to the search for beautiful combin-ations of colours in dress. The simplest principle is the combinationof various shades, or different intensities of the same colour. Forexample, it is suitable to combine a sky-blue suit with dark bluehat, blue handbag and blue shoes. Or, if you have a yellow or beigecoat, then brown details are appropriate. . . . Such combinationsare always beautiful and they do not require a refined feeling forcolour, or any knowledge of the colour palette. The second simpleprinciple of colour combination in dress is the use of neutral tones,i.e., white, black and grey. In these variants it is easy to achieve alot of effects, without a risk of appearing tasteless. . . . The mostdifficult and interesting principle in the combination of colours iscontrast. For example, a very risky combination of red and greencan be beautiful, if the colours are taken in the right proportions.This also applies to combinations of yellow and blue, sky-blue andpink, red and sky-blue, and so on. It is better to combine twocolours in dress, but we can even approve the combination of threecolours, if the third one belongs to the family of tones of one ofthe first two in the combination.

Sudakevich 1960: 22216

Throughout the socialist period the concept of taste went through a seriesof changes, which were informed by ideological shifts inside the socialistmaster narrative. The first radical shift in the concept of taste happenedin the new Central European socialist countries in the late 1940s. TheHungarian women’s magazine Ladies pronounced the style of Westernclothes tasteless and anachronistic in 1947. The latest Dior collection wasdescribed as “the fashion which has returned, although by the spirit ofprogress and taste had been already abolished once.”17 The new Czechmagazine Woman and Fashion specified in 1949 that “clothing must befree from ornamentation originating from a different historical period,i.e. lace, ribbons, gathers, unpractical placing of buttons, senseless vari-


ations of the basic shape of the collar, pockets, yoke, cuffs and the like”(Spalová 1949a).18 Even the very word elegance was rejected, because ofits bourgeois connotations, since for the bourgeoisie only the most expens-ive and the most decorative clothes were elegant. So, “socialist clothing—the clothing of the future—was supposed to substitute the word elegantwith the words: pleasant, good, smart, tasteful, as the style of socialistclothing would be suitable and worthy” (Spalová 1949b). Throughoutthe 1950s, words used to define Western fashion in the new socialistwomen’s magazines were: privileged, unpractical, irrational, irresponsible,impossible, too expensive, socially restrictive, decadent, and thereforeugly, while the new socialist fashion was supposed to be modest, practical,functional, tasteful, balanced, measured, available to all, appropriate,comfortable, quiet, and therefore beautiful.

Genuine socialist style, which would fulfill those criteria, never mat-erialized.19 It was particularly problematic at the end of the 1950s, whenthe socialist middle classes were emerging on the historical scene. Theaesthetics of their dress had to be decided upon fast, promoted throughthe media, and applied in everyday life. As socialist systems never evolvedtheir own unique version of an everyday culture or possessed their ownrepository of distinctive symbolic goods, socialism was forced at that timeto borrow its official dress style from the reservoir of bourgeois culture.Paradoxically, the official socialist discourse appropriated petit-bourgeoisstyle, which had previously been strongly rejected. In fact, petit-bourgeoisstyle, ranging from kitsch to “good taste,”20 had not been eradicated withthe communist seizure of power. It survived quietly, in the ideologicallyless controlled field of everyday life. By the end of the 1950s, socialismsuddenly needed two of its aesthetic expressions: pseudo-classical kitschand petit-bourgeois good taste. At that point official socialist taste shiftedto incorporate these two styles into its own fashion practices, creating twonew stylistic forms, which I call grandiose pseudo-classicism and socialistgood taste.

Grandiose Pseudo-classical Taste

The aesthetics of pseudo-classical kitsch informed the style of officialsocialist dress in its highly representational version, such as collectionspresented at fashion congresses between socialist countries. The socialistregimes failed to develop unique dress codes that were independent ofprevious sartorial traditions and prototypes. They copied bourgeois dresscodes but amplified them into the grandiose pseudo-classical style. Thatsuited the totalitarian pretensions of the regimes. The socialist countriesexhibited from the late 1950s their collections at the catwalks of socialistfashion congresses or domestic and international trade fairs. The longevening taffeta dresses and the serious day ensembles that were presentedon those occasions transmitted the very traditional idea of luxury. In 1958,Czechoslovakia even won the first award for its presentation at the WorldExhibition in Brussels. Luxurious and perfectly executed clothes, made-


to-measure by the pre-World War II fashion designers and tailors, anddisplayed at the exhibition under heavy crystal chandeliers, were highlypraised. While shops were suffering from serious shortages and poor-quality goods, trade fair displays turned into an art form in Czechoslo-vakia.21

Throughout the 1960s, Hungary was very active in promoting officialsocialist dress at fashion shows held in the West. The Hungarian statepropaganda company Hungexpo organized fashion shows in Copen-hagen, Oslo, Bergen, West Berlin, Rome, Milan, and in the USA andCanada, meant exclusively for the Western public. The clothes could notbe bought in shops back home nor were they supposed to be sold toWestern customers or department stores. Lavish presentations in luxuryhotels had a propaganda role.22 The report Miss Hungary and the Others,from the Hungarian women’s magazine Nõk Lapja, dealt with the Hun-garotex presentation of Hungarian fashion in Sweden and Finland in thelate 1960s. It also clearly demonstrated that official socialist dress wasnot about the promotion of fashion but about the state itself. 23 All thoseexcessive presentations of official fashion were supposed to demonstratestability, continuity, and changelessness, desired by regimes that had cometo power neither through democratic elections nor through dynasticsuccession.

The old-fashioned concept of luxury in representational socialist dresswas equally informed by political isolationism and cultural autarky.Socialist concepts of elegance and refinement had become seriouslyoutdated and distanced from Western fashion trends during the ten-yearbreak, as well as alienated from the more sophisticated Western dresspractices. To paraphrase Slavoj Zizek (1989: 139), the sartorial practiceof official socialist dress confirmed the capacity of official discourse toarrest and immobilize the fashionable historical moment—the formalityof Western fashion in the mid-1950s—and to isolate that detail from itshistorical totality.24 Official socialist dress maintained the stiffness offormal dress codes throughout the 1960s, a decade after Western fashionleft them for more relaxed and youthful styles. Ontologically, the timeless-ness of pseudo-classicism perfectly suited the slow socialist concept of time(Figure 4).

At the end of the 1950s, when socialist magazines started to report onWestern fashion, topics and personalities were carefully chosen in orderto suit classical ideals of official socialist dress. A reporter from theCroatian picture magazine Globus visited Paris to observe the seasonalfashion shows, and chose Coco Chanel as a heroine. Coco was “a pro-moter of functional and comfortable fashion that emphasizes femalebeauty and is totally feminine, in opposition to her competitors Dior,Givenchy or Balmain, who insist on bizarre and spectacular effects”.25

The magazine informed its readership that Coco Chanel had alreadycaused a number of fashion revolutions in the past, but stressed that shehad rejected the role of fashion revolutionary in the latest phase of her


Figure 4Model designed by T.Kuzmecova from the House ofFashion. Fashion Journal(Moscow), no. 2, 1958, p. 38.


career. According to the magazine, Coco understood that there was noneed for a new revolution, as contemporary fashion already fulfilled allwomen’s needs and “allowed a woman to dress aesthetically and practic-ally, but still look beautiful, be free in her movements, elegant, and evento attract attention”.26

Official socialist dress had an exclusive task: to develop a new sartorialclassic, which would fulfill the laws of classical beauty and harmony.Socialist fashion would then escape the constant change of decadentbourgeois fashion and become as eternal as classical art. The East Germanfashion historian Erika Thiel likened socialist uniformed dress codes withantique Greek dress: “You can compare this type of clothing to Greekcostume, which also consisted of a standardized shape—a square pieceof cloth—and only the person wearing it would present it with form.27

Similarly, an advert by a Czech jewelry company in 1960 featured adrawing of a Greek fully clad in antique costume, offering a necklace toa woman dressed like a Greek goddess. The caption read: “From antiquity,women crave jewellery,” while the photograph of a contemporary melan-cholic woman, with a bracelet on her hand, only stressed her longing foradornment.

Official socialist fashion shared an obsession about producing newclassics with socialist realism. Actually, official socialist dress can beconsidered as a sartorial expression of socialist realism. Official socialistfashion and socialist realism not only shared an appreciation of classicism,but ontological principles as well. Official socialist dress in its representa-tional form belonged to a different ontological reality than everyday dress.Its realm spread from surreal Five Year Plans to fashion presentations attrade fairs and fashion congresses.28

Socialist good taste

The second stylistic expression of official socialist dress was socialist goodtaste. It was a diluted form of pseudo-classical taste. While the latter wasgiven a highly representational role, socialist good taste served the purp-oses of everyday life, but it still operated inside the field of official socialistcultural production. To develop socialist good taste, the official discourseborrowed aesthetic categories from petit-bourgeois “good taste.” At theend of the 1950s, those categories were needed to soften the asceticismof proletarian style, which the ideological discourse did not at the timeofficially renounce. Socialist good taste was the result of the merger ofproletarian style with petit bourgeois “good taste.” It was producedthrough the hybridization of their mutual characteristics, like modesty,blandness, appropriateness, and comfort. At the same time, prettiness andelegance were two crucial categories appropriated from petit-bourgeoisgood taste, and added to its socialist version. Ideologically, in such a formsocialist good taste was the real and proper aesthetic statement for thenew official socialist dress.


Generally, there are significant differences between fashion proper and“good taste” in Western dress, mainly related to the latter’s aestheticalneutrality and its changelessness. Good taste manifests itself in the Westerndress codes of different strata of society, from the upper class to the lowermiddle classes. All the versions of “good taste” share its main character-istics: anonymity, neutrality, strictness, conformity, prettiness, and slowchange. Actually, any “good taste” in Western clothes, ranging from theupper class to the middle class or the petit-bourgeois version, is an anti-fashion statement.29 Regarding the concept of time, socialist good tastehad similar characteristics. Both versions of “good taste,” petit bourgeoisand socialist, were almost immutable, and equally scared of unpredicta-bility and individuality. The socialist regimes reserved for themselves theright to eventually change dress standards. In that way they introduceda slow movement in sartorial codes, but always inside their master narra-tive of modesty, simplicity, and appropriateness.

Time was differently inscribed on official socialist dress than on Westernfashionable dress. Official socialist dress was a prisoner of time, associalism mainly neglected change in favor of stability. Ontologically,socialism realized itself as a coherent and linear narrative. The slow andcontrolled socialist world could not deal with change precisely because,as a system, it was disturbed by the discontinuity of time. When reportingchanges in Western fashion styles, socialist women’s magazines wouldproduce nervous reports, which revealed the system’s atavistic fear ofchange especially with regard to the concept of time, much more than tohems, cuts or colors:

Fashion was never so moody as in the last couple of seasons. Severalfashion trends appeared and disappeared in a short time, andwomen welcomed only the simple and elegant options that suitedthem. There were bits of such options in previous trends. Anyway,the latest fashion, sack-style dress, will hardly find any admirersamong women, although fashion designers insist that a woman wasnever so elegant as in the sack-dress.30

This fear of discontinuity applied to both past and future Westernfashions as long as fashion was too adventurous and frivolous, meaningthat it could not be controlled. The field of official socialist fashion waspermanently in defense against historical references, as they disturbed itsnew ideological and organizational structure, based on the nationalizationof previously existing fashion establishments and the central control ofall fashion and textile plants.31 In contrast, there was no similar contradic-tion between structure and history in Western fashion. Simultaneousattacks on the sack dress, published in the Western fashion press in thelate 1950s, acknowledged that it was designed by the same designers thathad launched previous trends and would launch new ones again nextseason.32


While fashion needs both novelty and standardization to developproperly, socialism was willing to accept only the second, controllable partof fashion’s dynamic rhythm. Staying true to its ontological postulates,socialism tended to abolish novelty or, at least, strictly control it. Allsocialist sartorial codes and practices were rooted in that ontologicalanxiety about the fluidity of time. In 1958, the Croatian women’s maga-zine Svijet praised the presentation of new fashion trends precisely becauseit did not propose novelties:

As fashion for the coming spring and summer season is over-whelmed with enormous changes, the outfits at our fashion showwere cleverly designed. The middle ground was applied betweenthis year’s and last year’s fashion. All outfits are adjusted to ourwomen and to our circumstances; if our ready to wear industryaccepts them, we can claim in advance that our women will bedressed very nicely and tastefully.33

Trends were centrally imposed on textile and clothes companies, which,due to the hierarchical levels of decision-making, caused delays in promot-ing new styles. Ideologically, the centralized fashion system suited theconcept of a slow flow of socialist time. When journalists from theAmerican daily newspaper Christian Science Monitor visited the CzechInstitute of Interior and Fashion Design in 1967, they discovered thattrends were imposed on the fashion designers in the Czech textile andclothes factories by that institution.34

In the late 1950s, official attitudes towards Western fashion entered anew phase. The period of heavy industrialization at the expense of every-thing else had ended, both in Russia and in the Central European coun-tries. As the socialist regimes brought the harsh and open repression toan end and began to buy the loyalty of their citizens with material rewards,socialist modernity came closer to its Western counterpart. But to becomeappropriate, fashion changes had to be filtered and adjusted, and Westerninfluences were heavily scrutinized by the regimes. The Russian reporterL. Efremova found only functional and simple clothes on the Paris streetsin 1958. She observed that many Parisian women would go to the theateror a party in the same dress they had worked in, even though eveningdresses also existed. Belonging to an artistic nation with a tradition ofexcellent taste, elegance, and accuracy, French women knew how tochoose an outfit, being at the same time modest and simple. Efremova’s(1958: 24–5) conclusion was: “So, the final truth is: Paris fashion ispractical, because simplicity, elegance and modesty are always present inday dress.”35 Being a senior fashion artist in the All Union House ofFashion in Moscow, Efremova’s praise of “Paris as a long lasting centreof European fashion,” confirmed that the official attitude towards West-ern fashion had changed. In 1959, the new relationship with Westernfashion was also promoted by posters in Moscow streets announcing


Christian Dior’s fashion show in the Moscow’s sports hall The Wings ofSoviet Air Club. Dior’s highest representatives and fashion models stayedin Moscow for ten days, presenting shows on a daily basis (Trotskaia1959).36

From the late 1950s throughout the 1960s, socialist good taste servedthe precise ideological need of reconciliation between socialism andfashion. Previously despised categories, such as prettiness, femininity, andelegance, were recoded to suit new socialist needs. When in 1964 theCroatian women’s magazine Svijet decided to introduce an award for theready-to-wear dress, a potential winner had to fulfill the criteria:

to be of simple but original cut, to be elegant, practical and capable,with little alternations or with addition of some details, to servedifferent purposes. Obligatorily, it has to be produced from dom-estic fabric and for the domestic market, and executed in a solidand correct way. These criteria result from many letters by you, ourreaders, letters that daily arrive at our magazine. In them you askus to suggest to you the type of clothes which would serve not onlyone occasion but be suitable almost for any time of the day, natur-ally, with slight changes.37

And which dress won? A little navy princess-line dress, with a satincollar and tiny satin buttons which, in the true style of socialist good taste,tamed Western fashion trends with the socialist concepts of practicalityand modesty.

Socialist good taste was granted political approval exactly because itwas ordinary, anonymous, moderate, and banal. Its visual blankness couldbe called “untroubled prettiness.” Theorizing the phenomenon of socialistfashion inside the system itself, the East German art historian Erika Thielargued for purposeful and comfortable clothes and simple cuts. She urgedsocialist fashion designers to unite “the art of production” with the“purposefulness of beauty” in their dresses. Women, on the other hand,were supposed to exercise their creativity by combining basic and stand-ardized elements of clothing (Thiel 1979: 194). René König (1988: 272)recognized the petit-bourgeois essence of socialist taste:

The union of the beautiful and useful, which was sometimes calledfunctionality, is in no way humanistic, but, in the best of ways,“petit-bourgeois,” as it can embellish everyday life without a traceof transgression, at the same time damaging any impulse towardsreal creativity. (Figure 5)

At the end of the 1950s, socialism aligned itself with a random collec-tion of semi-knowledges and well-worn pronouncements on “true” style.It was a cheap choice, which required minimal previous knowledge orsophistication by either the unskilled socialist textile worker or the new


Figure 5Models from the 8th FashionCongress held in Moscow in1957 (Czech on the left, EastGerman on the right). FashionJournal (Moscow), no. 1, 1958,p. 25.


socialist consumer. Fashion was now allowed in socialist societies, but onlyin a controlled and dull petit-bourgeois version. Developing under thebureaucratic gaze, official socialist dress respected rules of appropriate-ness, comfort, practicality, and moderation, informed by the aestheticsof socialist good taste. The conservative nature of that taste was equallysuited to socialist regimes and to their new apolitical middle classes, asthey were both interested in preserving the status quo. In a book calledThe Secret of the Well-dressed Woman: The Rules of Attractiveness andGood Taste the Croatian fashion designer Zuzi Jelinek stressed that awoman did not need to feel obliged to wear the latest fashion. Thefashionable woman

is in danger of becoming a fashion doll, and nobody appreciatesthat. Fashion fads change so fast that it is very difficult to keep upwith their pace. The most fashionable dress will be out of fashionbefore you had even chance to put it on three times. (Jelinek 1961:91)

On the other hand, only true style was simple and elegant.The reasons why socialism adopted the petit-bourgeois style, and not

some other version, were also rooted in socialist poverty, lost traditionsof dressmaking, and the previous rejection of past fashion styles, bothdomestic and foreign. Without its own fashion heritage, official socialistclothing found the easiest applicable reservoir of fashion quotes in petit-bourgeois style.39 Both versions of socialist taste throughout the 1960sserved the official politics of style. A grandiose and luxurious pseudo-classical version testified to the continuity of the system and was highlyaspirational for the emerging middle classes. On the other hand, byadvocating modesty in the cut and quality of fabric, and by suggestingcreativity within standardization, socialist good taste served the newstylistic synthesis of modesty and prettiness. New rules were set, and thenew socialist middle classes were expected to obey them.

From Red to Beige: A Set of Rules

1: “At seven o’clock? . . .Yes, I will be there . . .”; 2: “Sure I will bethere, but what should I wear? . . . Big trouble . . . But today I havethe opportunity to put on not just my own clothes but also thedresses by the Design Company for The Garment Industry. Well. . .”; 3: “If we do not go anywhere special, just for a little walk orfor a coffee in a small café, I may put on this pink-and-purple-polka-dot suit with this tiny blouse. But . . . 4: “. . . if we are going for astroll at Margit Island, I’d better dress in this silk afternoon dresswith a wrap . . . 5: “. . . although for that occasion a printed nylondress with a tiny waist and a huge skirt might fit better, as it is great


for dancing . . . ; 6: “Or should I rather choose this black and whitesilk-like dress with white ornaments. It’s quite discreet accompaniedwith white gloves; he does not like me dressing too loud . . . 7: . . .again, for the same reason, he would be glad to see me in this skirtwith a transparent blouse. What do you think about it?; 8: So, whatdo we think? Each outfit is very nice, but to give one more idea:how about putting on the very same nice white skirt and silk blousein which we have seen you at the telephone? Anyway, have a niceevening.”

“Appointment at the National Theatre at 7 pm,” Women’sJournal (Budapest), 195840

When socialism had come to an unwritten truce with fashion through theconcept of socialist good taste, socialist regimes exchanged their previouscrude ideology with a new, softer control promoted through women’smagazines, popular novels, films, and etiquette books. The state-con-trolled media offered a safe educational context in which unpredictablefashion desires could be both disciplined and refined. This was neededbecause the new socialist middle classes lacked any sophisticated know-ledge of culture and its different practices. They were established only aftergoing through a process of rapid formal schooling and informal gatheringof rituals and habits accompanying their middle-class status. Once theprivate vices of the Nomenklatura became public virtues, rules on theappropriate style were disseminated so that every member of the newsocialist middle class could master them. Each area and each situationwere covered: travel, work, home, beach, dancing, ball, theater premiere,political meeting, the First of May Parade, birthday parties, dinner, lunch,weddings, funerals, walks in the park, picnics . . . Some rituals were old,some were new, but new consensuses on proper dresses, the right colors,and suitable accessories had to be reached about all of them. Nothing wasleft out: a dress had to be appropriate but pretty, functional but notextravagant, clean and without stains, feminine but not vulgar.

The Hungarian etiquette book How Should We Behave? clearly distin-guished between good and bad taste through practical advice. Membersof the new socialist middle class were reminded of even the most trivialdetails:

However harmoniously and properly combined the elements ofdress, if a button is missing, or a stain spoils the beauty of a dress,we could hardly say that this woman is pretty.41

Another Hungarian good-manners manual (Réczey et al. 1960: 252)smoothly combined three elements: good taste, modesty, and patriotism:


Hungarian women and girls are famous for their fine clothing allaround the world. Their elegant dress is not only a money-problem.They are women who are real artists in variety. Sometimes theywork miracles with a skirt that is too wide or tight at the waist,and with one or two pullovers, or a scarf. They say: if money isscarce, add an idea!

The first socialist etiquette book appeared in Croatia in 1963.42 Itadvocated a similar set of values: tidiness, appropriateness, and modeststyle in dress. There was a clear division between clothes for work, home,and going out. The last category was further divided into morning,afternoon, and evening clothes. Severe rules of propriety applied evento evening dress. It was noted that an evening dress could be madefrom taffeta, brocade, lace, chiffon, organza, and accompanied by fur,jewelry, gloves, and a special pair of shoes. But at the same time it wassuggested that “at certain point, the imagination should be restrained”(Zelmanovic 1963: 52), either because of financial reasons or out of pureself-control.

The socialist etiquette books that had appeared in the 1960s could becompared with the Western manuals on good manners from the late1800s, that had also accompanied the rise to power of the new middleclasses. Studying the civilization process in the West, Norbert Elias arguedthat the rise of the bourgeoisie and its appropriation of power from thearistocracy was a gradual and dynamic civilizing process. Good manners,everyday rituals, dress, speech, and clothes reflected the rise of the outsiderclass. When the bourgeoisie finally took over the function of the dominat-ing class, its manners resulted from its own codes and those that historic-ally preceded them (Elias 2000: 433). Similarly, in his study of the Frenchbourgeois nineteenth-century dress codes, Philippe Perrot stated that theflood of etiquette books between 1840 and 1875 responded to an unprece-dented demand from segments of the still uninitiated bourgeoisie whichwanted to legitimate its new status or complement its financial successwith appropriate good manners and a proper dress (Perrot 1994: 87–9).

The socialist regimes, on the other hand, invented their middle classes.They engineered them politically when it suited their needs, and thenimposed on them certain rules regarding appropriate new tastes. The newsocialist middle classes mimicked the bourgeois rituals of proper conductand proper dress as they were told to do. And they had to manage to learnthem very fast. The socialist civilizing processes did not arise from aprocess of democratization or from the openness of society, but they ratherreflected a reconfiguration of state power over the individual. The socialistregimes recognized that new desires were arising, of which fashion anddress were among the most important. Still, fashion had to subject itselfto the rules of appropriateness, and it was only then that fashion waspolitically recognized. As Pierre Bourdieu would put it, “the concessionsof politeness always contain political concessions” (1977: 95). In social-


ism, the change from red to beige in dress color was not a mere aestheticchoice. In her role of a socialist arbiter of taste, the Croatian fashiondesigner Zuzi Jelinek (1977: 139) wrote about her collaboration with astate-owned textile company: “I advised them not to produce any moreof that horrible colour . . . If a fabric in that ugly orange colour were notto be produced at all, customers would be forced to choose a nice beigecolour and would slowly get accustomed to it. After some time, thecustomers will refine their taste and they would themselves be shockedby the idea that they could have previously worn something that ugly.”

As the socialist civilization processes were channeled through dress andgood manners, women had to be introduced to new approved taste. Paperpatterns for home dressmakers were a regular feature in women’s media,which also published columns on appropriate dress and proper behavior.Socialist women’s magazines ran regular columns, like “The ABC of GoodManners,” “Fashion Lexicon,” or “A Pocket History of Fashion” (Svijet,Croatia), “School for Clothing” (Nõk Lapja, Hungary), “Women, Thisis for You” (Ogonek, Russia), and their educational texts insisted thatonly simplicity is elegant and beautiful. In a manner that combined thepatronizing style of Western women’s media with the socialist educationalapproach, not only was the new socialist good taste promoted, but so wasthe old petit-bourgeois concept of femininity as well. The repetition hadan enormous role in imposing the newly approved feminine image. Thenew rules were simple and were preached by socialist women’s magazinesad nauseam: shoes and handbags should match, more than three colorsshould never be used in an outfit, be pretty but do not overdress. A newfemale identity was produced by such repetitions. As hats had beenperceived as a short cut to ladylike classical femininity, socialist women’smagazines were on a mission to promote hats at the end of the 1950s.Information on the history of female hats was provided, dealing withshapes and fabrics of historical styles,44 and magazines advised on aproper style of hat for different types of face.45 At the same time new stylesof appropriate hats were publicized in women’s media and picture maga-zines.46 Hats were supposed to be accompanied by the right gloves andhandbags, and faults in a proper lady-like style were attacked.47 Analyzingthe Soviet-type of the Newspeak, Françoise Thom (1989: 85) stated:“Repetition here is more than a pedagogic process. Stylistically, it incar-nates the invincible clarity and supreme authority of the idea.”

At the end of the 1950s, the idea of a proper lady in traditional en-semble and a hat was not really about clothes. It was a visual testamentto the official reconceptualization of gender. The column “School forClothing” in the Hungarian women’s magazine Nõk Lapja demonstrateda process through which the proletarian sartorial asceticism was carefullyrecoded into a controlled version of femininity:

Thus, do not dress in a scandalously different way from what isusual or acceptable in our society. The astonished glances will


Figure 6Hungarian model presented atthe Fashion Congress held inMoscow in 1957. FashionJournal (Moscow), no. 1, 1958,p. 30.

hardly ever express appreciation. Of course, don’t go from oneextreme to the other. A grey uniform is nothing to be proud ofeither; it marks a lack of good mood. A woman should start wearing


a hat if it is well shaped, or put on a new dress if it makes her prettyand yet she can remain tasteful. (Figure 6)48

A new shift in the state formation of gender was also reflected in theCzech magazine Woman and Fashion. Reporting from the Cannes FilmFestival, a Czech male reporter was charmed by the beauty and groomingof French women. Following that experience, he looked at Czech womenfrom a new perspective:

It has occurred to me many times that over the past ten years wehave greatly wronged our women. A remarkable dress and perfectharmony of colour was for us eccentric and quite platonic were theoccasional remarks and calls: let us give our women all that is thebest and the nicest because they deserve it! (Vesely 1956)

Initially, the creation of the new woman was the part of a whole projectof mastering nature. Socialism was about creating a new pure nature inwhich there was no place for fashion precisely because it was seen asartificial.49 Feminized bodies and femininity itself were considered to benot only bourgeois but alienated in the ontological sense, because theywere artificial in the first place. In socialism, fashion and femininitybecame political issues as they opposed the nature of the system itself. Incontrast, both New Man and New Woman were molded on NietzscheanÜbermensch, as socialism rejected femininity as a cultural and ontologicaldifference. But at the beginning of the 1960s, even the political activistofficially left her ascetic style.

The opinion that the politically engaged woman-worker does notneed to take care of her dress-style is wrong. On the contrary, herappearance will be more appropriate if she is dressed tastefully butsimply. A lot of people take an interest in her looks, many womenhave her as a role model and she has to give an example by the wayshe dresses (Jelinek 1961: 115).

So, what was the most appropriate style for her? It was a simple butelegant jacket and skirt made out of a good fabric in colder months, or acotton chemise dress in the summer, or an ensemble consisting of a littleblouse with three-quarter sleeves combined with a pleated skirt. A littlefeminine hat, short white gloves, a string of pearls or a brooch could beadded in socially more demanding situations, such as at official partymeetings, formal parties, cocktails, important anniversaries and The Firstof May Parades (Jelinek 1961: 115).

The traditional concept of femininity suited the conservative nature ofsocialist good taste. As the latter demonstrated that socialism failed todevelop its own hierarchy of tastes, the new approval of the traditionalfemale ideal reflected the socialist failure to engineer a new socialist


woman. When sexual difference was reintroduced without challengingthe conventions of the traditional gender division, socialist women losttheir important place inside the only authentic, male world. They had todivide themselves between that world and the traditional women’s world,from motherhood to dressing up.

The education of women to appropriate fashion and grooming startedearly. In 1960, the Soviet advice book To You, Girls treated fashion inthe context of classical Russian literature, and reminded its young femalereaders that their role models should be Natasha Rostova and AnnaKarenina: “The first ball! An unforgettable array of memories for the restof your life! Remember Natasha Rostova! There is a moment in each girl’slife in which she puts on the first evening dress with the same palpitationlike Natasha” (Sudakevich 1960: 219). While preparing a dress for theirhigh-school graduation ball, girls longed for advice on colors, cuts, andtypes of fabric. Informed by the aesthetics of modest socialist good taste,such advice was in the manual, but girls were at the same time remindedthat Anna Karenina never attracted attention with her clothes. Her ballgowns were just a frame for her beauty and personality to shine through.Soviet girls should follow that example: “Do not try to attract attentionwith your dress. Be interesting and refined yourself” (Sudakevich 1960:219). Ideologically, the new Soviet ritual of a ball at the end of the highschool, practiced by young socialist girls, had little to do with contempo-rary Western fashion trends. Socialist ball dresses were supposed to beinspired by luxurious and ultra-feminine ball gowns of the Russian tragicand aristocratic literary heroines.

On the other hand, by the end of the 1950s, Western fashion hadalready left traditional postwar conservative femininity,50 not just tochange it into a series of youthful styles, but also to challenge the genderroles of both women and men. (Figure 7) While socialist women were atthe end of the 1950s and through the 1960s relentlessly educated into“proper ladies” in a huge politically dictated campaign, the Westernfemale ideal had been already transformed from a mature into a muchyounger version of woman, only to become androgynous skinny creatureat the end of the 1960s. But that period was important for official socialistfashion as well. The decade in which official socialist dress set out unques-tionable rules on appropriateness was finally over.

The Decline of Official Socialist Dress

Classical form, classical show, classical music. Chanel presented thisnew collection abroad for the first time. On the catwalk, despiteits enormous size, there was only one model wearing clothes, mov-ing slowly to the music by Mozart and Lully. Discreet make-up, justhighlighting her eyes, smooth hair. The style of Chanel outfits (theartistic hand of this outstanding French woman has already become


a style) is well known all over the world. They are distinguishedby their sophisticated taste, their eternal uninhibited elegance, andthey are so refined that they seem almost old-fashioned.51

Coco Chanel’s classicism was pronounced old-fashioned in this edi-torial of the Soviet Fashion Journal in 1968. The timing of that pro-nouncement was significant. In 1967, the Russian All-Union House ofFashion had organized an International Fashion Festival in Moscow withboth Western and East European collections, as official socialist fashionsuddenly dared to compete with Western fashion trends, at least at afestival. In homage to classicism praised in the previous decade, the juryrecognized Coco Chanel’s presentation as the best current trend. But theGrand Prix was awarded to the Soviet designer Tatiana Osmerkina for adress under the name Russia. The Moscow International Fashion Festivalalso officially recognized the miniskirt for the first time. By that time,Western fashion novelties had already begun to make their appearancein the socialist fashion media. Reviewing the Paris Fall–Winter collectionsfor 1966/1967, the Soviet Fashion Journal declared that the “old” French

Figure 7Cover of the Croatianillustrated weekly Globus(Zagreb), no. 32, February 71960.


fashion houses had stayed true to the traditions of the classical school ofFrench elegance. But the journal was actually more impressed by “braveinnovators” like Pierre Cardin, who presented youthful collections in-spired by geometrical lines and space style.52 In 1966, the Czech officialfashion already presented clothes influenced by op art and Saint Laurent’sMondrian collection.

These ideological shifts towards fashionability at the end of the 1960sdid not mean, however, that socialist fashion and textile factories suddenlystarted to produce fashionable goods, and that the supply in the shopsbecame more varied. Official socialist dress was neither about fashion,nor about clothes. It was always simply a discourse with little bearing onreality. But the change in the official discourse demonstrated that the realthreat of the phenomenon of Western fashion was now much closer.Encouraged by the development of the second economies and secondsocieties,53 rock music, and liberated travel, unofficial dress practicesstarted to grow in strength and importance, making both information onfashion trends and fashionable goods themselves more easily available.The socialist middle classes, once established, expressed the universalbourgeois behavior patterns, from professional ambitions to consumeraspirations in which fashion featured prominently. Unable to suppress thenewly emerging demands for change in fashion, the official discourse wasforced to adjust to the faster flow of time and to renounce some of itscontrol over individuals and events. Fashion became one of activities ofthe second society that took place in everyday life, spreading the practicesof unofficial, Western-type modernity. Overlooked by the regimes andenjoyed by the people, fashion proper continued to disturb the socialistmaster narrative by recognizing change, encouraging individual expres-sion, affirming the present and its immediate pleasures, and breakingthrough socialist isolationism.

But the phenomenon of unofficial socialist fashion would never havehappened if it were not for the official socialist dress and socialist goodtaste. Smoothly blending proletarian asceticism and petit-bourgeoisprettiness, socialist good taste was the agency through which fashion waseventually reintroduced as a legitimate practice in the socialist countries.While official socialist dress and socialist good taste eased the introductionof Western fashion into the socialist systems, they were at the same timefatal factors that arrested the development of a genuine socialist fashionin the decades to follow. All the distortions that characterized socialistfashion were already transparent in the conservative aesthetics of officialsocialist dress from the end of the 1950s: an ontological anxiety aboutthe fluidity of time, a pathological fear of change, the hierarchical levelsof decision making in planned economies, the negligence of the market,the confused relationship towards Western fashion, cultural autarky, anda lack of experience informed by an earlier ideological rejection of fash-ion’s history. Although the official discourse never renounced modesty,moderation, and bland prettiness in dress, and continued to promote that


aesthetics through women’s magazines, official socialist dress and socialistgood taste had fulfilled their main historical role by the end of the 1960s.

Periodicals

Croatia

Svijet (World) (women’s biweekly)Globus (Globe) (illustrated weekly)

Czech Republic

Zena a móda (Woman and Fashion) (fashion monthly)Tvar (Applied Arts Journal) (monthly)Kveti (Flowers) (illustrated weekly)

Hungary

Nõk Lapja (Women’s Journal) (women’s weekly)Es a divat (This is Fashion) (fashion monthly)

Russia

Rabotnitsa (Working Woman) (women’s weekly)Zhurnal mod (Fashion Journal) (fashion monthly)Modeli sezona (Fashions of the Seasons) (fashion biannual)Moda stran socializma (Fashion of the Socialist Countries) (annual

publication)

Acknowledgements

The first version of this article was presented at the BASEES Conferencein Cambridge in 2001. Subsequent versions were presented at seminarsat the School for Slavonic and Eastern European Studies (London), andat the Institute for European Cultures, Russian State University forHumanities (Moscow). I am grateful to Wendy Bracewell, Oksana Gavri-shina, and Olga Vainshtein who invited me to present my work at thoseseminars and for the valuable comments received from participants.

My research in Hungary was made possible by the grant from theGender Department at the Central European University in Budapest. I amgrateful to Anna Wessely from ELTE (Budapest) and Marton Oblath fortheir assistance. I am also grateful to the Soros Open Society (Zagreb)for a travel grant that enabled me to carry out my fieldwork in CzechRepublic, where Konstantina Hlavácková, the curator from the Museumfor Applied Arts (Prague) was a great help.


Notes

1. An “a la furshet” party, obviously derived from the French word“fourchette,” table fork, is a buffet party. Maskulii felt it necessary toexplain in a footnote the concepts of both “cocktail” and “a la furshet”party: “Cocktail is an event that takes place between 5 and 8 pm, atwhich tea, wine, juices, pastries, and sweets are served. The namecomes from the English word meaning mixture of drinks. ‘A la furshet’party is a gathering at which people do not eat seating at the table,but standing. Appetizers are arranged at the table, and guests servethemselves.”

2. Actually, Stalin was the first to engineer the new socialist middle classin the mid-1930s. The loyal managerial and technical intelligentsia,elements of the former bourgeoisie and the surviving petit-bourgeoiselements fitted perfectly Stalin’s idea of the socialist middle class. Inpractice, during the mid-1930s, Stalinist regime encouraged socialdistinctions by creating huge disparities in wages and rewardingshockworkers in consumerist goods, among which clothes featuredprominently. In her seminal work Middle Class Values in Stalin’sRussia, Vera Dunham named the relationship between Stalin and hismiddle class the Big Deal.

3. Croatia was one of the republics of former Yugoslavia. My researchrefers only to Croatia, and not to the other republics of Yugoslavia.

4. Private fashion salons did not exist in the Soviet Union, where sartorialneeds of the privileged strata were served by a number of state-ownedstudios for the custom-made clothes, which guaranteed both excellentfabrics and final look of clothes. Those fashion studios existed widelyat both occupational and residential levels. Yet, more appreciatedoccupations (politicians, writers, sportsmen), and homes at moreprestigious addresses, were guaranteed better-sewn clothes.

5. Zuzi Jelinek presented her latest collection in Bergdorf Goodman anda couple of other leading New York department stores, employed aprofessional PR, grabbed some media attention, including an interviewto the New York Times (May 4 1959), and seized the opportunity tohave her dresses shot by a professional American photographer andmodeled by the famous model Suzy Parker. But she could not fulfillthe incoming orders by the buyers from important department stores.(I am grateful to Mrs Jelinek for giving me access to her privatearchive.)

6. Marton Oblath presented a very subtle account of the actual andsymbolical transaction between the socialist middle-class customer anda socialist couturier (Oblath 2000).

7. In those tacit deals between the leaderships and their new middleclasses, the same basic condition was respected: new freedoms werenot supposed to bring the nature of a political rule into question. Butthe Czech middle class betrayed that unofficial deal in 1968, by trying


to obtain more political freedoms during the Prague Spring. So theirdeal was revoked, and it was only in the early 1970s during the periodof Normalization that a deal was renegotiated in Czechoslovakia,when Gustav Husák’s regime compensated the lost promises of free-dom with more material goods for the middle class.

8. In 1967, even Christian Science Monitor reported on fashion showin “charming salon” of Eva, which employs “a staff of 200 in itsworkrooms,” and whose “styling and workmanship compared favour-ably to just finished New York press week collections” (Ness 1967).

9. “Success of Czech Clothes in German Democratic Republic,” Womanand Fashion (Zena a móda) (Prague), 1952, no. 12, p. 23. This reportstated that Czechoslovakia won over East Germany and Hungary atthe third fashion meeting. Next year, the Soviet Union joined thesocialist fashion congress in Prague, while Poland and Romania wereinvited as observers (“Show at the International Congress of Clothes,”Woman and Fashion (Zena a móda) (Prague), 1953, no. 11, p. 2).Socialist fashion congresses lasted throughout socialist times, until1986. The special annual magazine edition Fashion of the SocialistCountries (published in Moscow) accompanied each congress pre-senting collections of all participating countries, and these socialistannual fashion meetings were widely covered in both political dailiesand specialized women’s press in the respective countries.

10. The Hungarian Women’s Journal (Nõk Lapja), reviewed under thetitle “Dresses of Six Nations” the socialist fashion festival held in1958 in Budapest. The hierarchy among socialist countries wasacknowledged, with the Soviet fashion alone held to be at the levelof the latest trends in Paris, although miraculously still staying trueto the traditional Soviet style (Women’s Journal (Nõk Lapja) (Buda-pest), November 1 1958).

11. Working Woman (Rabotnitsa) (Moscow), 1957, no. 7, pp. 28–9.12. Kvety (Prague), 1957, no. 31, p. 23; Fashion Journal (Zhurnal mod)

(Moscow), 1961, no. 3, p. 14.13. Fashion Journal (Zhurnal mod) (Moscow), Winter 1958/1959, p. 37.14. Fashion Journal (Zhurnal mod) (Moscow), 1961, no. 3, p. 14.15. Barthes stated that the revolutionary made the world, while the

already established bourgeois conserved it. The language of theformer aimed at transforming the world, while the latter wanted toeternalize it. Barthes insisted that the poverty of the Myth on the Leftwas based on that, and that only the Myth on the Right was rich,theatrical, sleek, taking hold of everything and inventing itself cease-lessly.

16. The text of the fashion designer A. A. Sudakevich “Let Us DressSmartly” (“Odevaites’ krasivo”) was published as a chapter in anetiquette book meant for young girls To You, Girls (Vam, devushki).

17. Ladies (Asszonyok) (Budapest) August 1947 (quoted in Dosza 1991a:22–4). Founded in 1946, Ladies (Asszonyok) was the first Hungarianwomen’s magazine to be published after World War II. It was renamed


Nõk Lapja (Women’s Journal) in 1949, and published by the officialNational Council of Hungarian Women. From its beginning, itfeatured three pages of fashion, placed among other more appropriatesocialist topics on women and their role in society. Nõk Lapja regu-larly reflected the official politics regarding Western fashion.

18. The monthly magazine Woman and Fashion was started in 1949 asa joint project of the official communist Association of Women andthe new founded state institution Textile Production, which centrallycontrolled design, production and distribution of clothes from 1949on. In Woman and Fashion, the relationship towards Western fashionfollowed ideological needs of the regime.

19. The genuine socialist fashion did not happen because of variousreasons, poverty and technological backwardness certainly playinga significant role in it, especially in Russia following the 1917 revolu-tion. In other socialist countries after 1948, like Hungary and Czech-oslovakia, the newly imposed central Institutes for Fashion werebadly managed and inefficient in their role of total control overdesign, production, and distribution of clothes and textiles. Thatideologically informed break-up with previous sartorial traditionshad tragic consequences at the practical level. See also KonstantinaHlavácková’s account on the development of the postwar Czechfashion (Hlavácková 2000).

20. Each definition of good taste is arbitrary. I refer throughout the textto petit-bourgeois good taste, which was ordinary, banal, anony-mous, and scared of any transgression.

21. In 1958, the whole issue of the journal for the applied arts Tvar wasdedicated to various artistic issues of trade fair displays (Tvar)(Prague), 1958, nos 6–7.

22. Agi Oblath, who through the 1960s and 1970s was in charge oforganization of those Hungarian fashion presentations in the West,kindly shared with me her memories about those events in an inter-view (Budapest, February 5 1999).

23. Women’s Journal (Nõk Lapja) (Budapest), August 31 1968, pp. 20–1.

24. Zizek refers to the difference between the immobility of historicalmaterialism in contrast to the dialectical practices of Marxist doxa.

25. “Chanel 1959. From Paris: The Autumn Fashion for Normal Women”(“Chanel 1959. Pariz: Jesenja moda za normalne zene”), Globus(Zagreb), August 22 1959.

26. On the other hand, observing similarities between her styles in the1920s and 1930s with those from 1954 onward, the Western mediapronounced Chanel’s collections in the 1950s conservative and old-fashioned. See de la Haye and Tobin (1994). Valerie Steele (1993)observed that, contrary to the French and English, only the Americanmagazines, which were themselves in fear of fashion changes, praisedChanel after her comeback in 1954.


27. Socialism was still struggling with the theory of socialist dress in the1970s (Thiel 1979: 196).

28. Analyzing the literature of socialist realism, Leonid Heller (1997: 51–75, 68) stated: “Zhdanovite realism presupposed the objective exist-ence of everything it depicted. It thus created reality, much in the waythe avant-garde had hoped to create it (and, for that matter, not unlikemedieval literature, with its refusal to question different ontologicalstatus of the “seen” and the “written.”

29. Ted Polhemus and Lynn Procter argued that fashion expresses itselfthrough arbitrary fashion signs, while anti-fashion lives on throughnatural anti-fashion symbols. Following that division, they stressedthat both upper-class and middle-class dress codes belong to anti-fashion symbols. “Lasting quality” belongs to upper-class rhetoric,while middle-class style is described as “nothing in extremes”—nothing too cheap, too expensive, too formal, too slovenly, too old-fashioned or too trendy (Polhemus and Procter 1978). The alreadyvisible class difference between the upper-class’s “lasting quality” andthe middle-class’s “nothing-too-cheap-or-too-expensive” style becomeseven more transparent in the impoverished petit-bourgeois versionof “good taste.” In this, the most diluted of its sartorial versions, so-called good taste is modest, banal, moderate, practical, and simple.

30. “Fashion is moody. It keeps inventing nonsense” (“Moda je hirovita.Ona izmislja kojesta”), Vecernji Vjesnik (Zagreb), May 10 1958.

31. The dramatic story of the disappearance of the Czech interwarfashion in the late 1940s demonstrated that the attack on fashion wasfiercest in the country which had the longest and the most appreciatedsartorial tradition among the new socialist countries. In 1949, thestate enterprise Textile Production was founded by a decree of theMinister of Light Industry and it was to coordinate all activities ofnewly nationalized textile companies, from design to production. Inthe late 1940s similar ideological attacks and the politically imposednegligence of previous technical knowledge and sartorial traditionwent on in other new socialist countries. Following the Communisttakeover of power in 1948, all the Hungarian fashion houses werealso nationalized, and the state-controlled Central Design Companyfor Garment Industry (RTV) was established in 1950. The main goalof that institution, which was later replaced by The HungarianFashion Institute (MDI), was to provide information and logistics tothe state fashion and textile industry.

32. Writing about French haute couture, Pierre Bourdieu observed thatthe field of fashion production had a structure that is the product ofits earlier history and the principle of its subsequent history (Bourdieu1993: 136).

33. Svijet, April 1 1958. Svijet was the Croatian fashion magazine, startedby the main state-owned publishing house Vjesnik in 1953, andrunning throughout the whole period of socialism.


34. “Czechoslovaks seen as Fashion Conscious,” Christian Science Mon-itor, February 10 1967. Only the experts from the Institute of Interiorand Fashion Design traveled to the Western fashion capitals, and werein possession of Western fashion magazines. During that interview,the directors observed that fashion designers in state-owned comp-anies would be fools if they did not accept new trends proposed bythe Institute: “The very latest trends and for free!”

35. Monthly Fashion Journal (Zhurnal mod) and biannual Fashions ofthe Seasons (Modeli sezona) were luxurious fashion publications,started in the mid-1930s, designed inside the central House of Fashionin Moscow, and published under the auspices of the Ministry of theLight Industry.

36. The company Christian Dior sent two of its highest representativesto the Moscow fashion show: Dior’s general manager Jacques Rouëtand Henry Fayol, who was in charge of Dior’s business in his financialbacker’s company Boursac.

37. “Award in search of a name” (“Nagrada koja ceka ime”). Svijet(Zagreb), no. 17, September 1 1964, p. 10.

38. Regarding the Soviet concept of taste in that context, Stalin’s andKhrushchev’s political cultures produced very different aesthetics.After the Stalinist monumental and baroque style, which equallyaffected the arts, architecture, and dress, the aesthetics of officialsocialist dress during the Khrushchev period in Russia was informedby simple and moderate lines. That style was far away from Stalinistkitsch, but, on the other hand, was banal and anonymous, andwithout a trace of transgression. See also Hutchings (1968) and Reid(1999) on the Soviet design in the 1960s.

39. Elizabeth Wilson stressed fashion’s frequent use of quotation (Wilson1990), while Ulrich Lehmann insisted that fashion needed quotationin order to aesthetically rewrite its own history (Lehmann 1999).

40. “Appointment at the National Theatre at 7 pm,” Women’s Journal(Nõk Lapja) (Budapest), July 24 1958. In this two-page fashionphoto-reportage a coquettish young woman chatted on the telephoneabout choosing appropriate clothes for a date. In photographs, herbillowing skirts were accompanied by hats, gloves, satin bows, tinyhandbags, and jewelry. Moreover, all those feminine and elegantclothes were produced by the state-owned Design Company for theGarment Industry.

41. Burget, L. and S. Kovácsvölgi (1959) How Should We Behave?(Hogyan Viselkedjünk?). Budapest: Móra (quoted in Oblath 2000:45).

42. In the following twenty-two years, the Croatian etiquette bookIllustrated Etiquette came out altogether in seven editions, each ofthem printed in 15,000 copies, which was considered as the bestselling publishing story. The author Djordje Zelmanovic claimed inthe seventh edition: “The book expressed huge social changes, as the


urban population doubled in former Yugoslavia in those two decades:from 2,1 to 4 millions and many of its members were in desperateneed to refine their manners” (Zelmanovic 1985: 6–7). In my inter-view with Mr Zelmanovic (February 24 2001), he also remarked thatthe publisher had put enormous pressure on him to write that manualin the first place, presenting him with an already existing collectionof French, English, and German etiquette books, and agreeing to payhim a high fee for writing it.

43. In a mission to bring a dash of style to the masses, Zuzi Jelinek wasenraged to find large quantities of an ugly orange wool fabric in thestate textile company she was consulting on the patterns, colors, andthe quality of their products.

44. “Female Hats,” column “Fashion Lexicon,” Svijet (Zagreb), no. 22,November 15 1964, p. 14.

45. “Does this hat suit you?” Working Woman (Rabotnitsa) (Moscow),December 1957, no. 12, p. 30.

46. Kvety (Prague), August 22 1957, no. 34, p. 23; Kvety (Prague),December 26 1957, no. 52, p. 23; Zhurnal mod (Moscow), Winter1958/59, p. 36; Svijet (Zagreb), October 15 1964, no. 20, p. 39.

47. Svijet (Zagreb), September 15 1964, no. 18, pp. 8–9.48. “School for Clothing,” lesson no. 39, Nõk Lapja (Budapest), January

2 1958.49. On the contrary, Charles Baudelaire used fashion and make-up to

develop his argument that nature was vulgar and thus human beingsshould rise above it by the aesthetic artificiality of dressing up.Fashion was for him a permanent and repeated attempt at the reform-ation of nature (Baudelaire 1964).

50. In February 1960, the Croatian picture magazine Globus still had agroup of models from the current Fashion Trade Fair wearing full-skirted dresses on its cover. On the other hand, from the late 1950sWestern designers were leaving the formal styles demonstrated in thetight-waisted, full-skirted line of the postwar years and had begunto propose more youthful and less structured clothes. Jacques Griffehad already designed a sack dress in 1958, and such less structuredlines became the prevailing look of the next decade.

51. Zhurnal mod (Moscow), no. 2, 1968 (Editorial).52. “Two Paris Fashions,” Fashion Journal (Zhurnal mod), Moscow,

Spring 1967, no. 1.53. Different authors observed the development of unofficial economies

and unofficial social networks in the Soviet Union and the CentralEuropean socialist countries from the 1960s on. Elemer Hankisscalled that phenomenon the “second society,” arguing that the firstofficial society and the second unofficial society existed in parallelin Hungary, complementing each other (Hankiss 1990). By wideningthe sphere of permitted activity within carefully controlled limits, theregimes succeeded in socially integrating the majority, allowing, in a


paternalistic way, the new socialist middle classes to develop throughdifferent forms and practices of the second society. Similarly, Jowittobserved that informal practices in Soviet Russia, from the secondeconomy to corruption, only testified “to the Soviet regime’s abilityto ensure that for the most part they contributed to, rather thansubverted, the Party’s formal tasks and general interests” (Jowitt1992: 121).

References and Further Reading

Attwood, L. 1999. Creating the New Soviet Woman: Women’s Magazinesas Engineers of Female Identity, 1922–53. Basingstoke and London:Macmillan.

Azhgikhina, N. and H. Goscilo. 1996. “Getting under Their Skin: TheBeauty Salon in Russian Womens Lives.” In H. Goscilo and B. Holmgren(eds) Russia Women Culture, pp. 94–121. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.

Barthes, R. 1976. Mythologies. London: Granada Publishing Limited.Baudelaire, C. 1964. The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays. New

York: A da Capo.Bourdieu, P. 1977. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press.Bourdieu, P. 1993. “Haute Couture and Haute Culture.” In Sociology

in Question, pp. 132–8. London: Sage.de la Haye, A. and S. Tobin. 1994. Chanel: The Couturiere at Work.

London: Victoria and Albert Museum.Djilas, M. 1957. The New Class: An Analysis of Communist System.

London: Thames and Hudson.Dózsa, K. 1991a. “Magyar divattörténet—I rész 1945–1949” (Hungarian

Fashion History, 1945–1949, Part 1). In Historia 4: 22–4.Dózsa, K. 1991b. “Magyar divattörténet—II rész 1949–1958” (Hun-

garian Fashion History, 1949-1958, Part 2). In Historia 5–6: 50–1.Dunham, V. S. 1990 [1976]. In Stalin’s Time: Middle-class Values in Soviet

Fiction. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.Elias, N. 2000. The Civilizing Process. Oxford: Blackwell.Fitzpatrick, S. 1993. “Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the

Representation of Privilege and Taste.” In The Cultural Front: Powerand Culture in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 216–37. Ithaca and London:Cornell University Press.

Gescer, O. and D. Kitzinger. 2002. “Fairy Sales: The Budapest Inter-national Fairs as Virtual Shopping Tours.” Cultural Studies 16(1): 145–64.

Hankiss, E. 1990. East European Alternatives. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Heller, L. 1997. “A World of Prettiness.” In T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko

(eds) Socialist Realism Without Shores, pp. 51–75. Durham, NC andLondon: Duke University Press.


Hlavácková, K. 2000. Czech Fashion 1940–1970: Mirror of the Times.Prague: u(p)m and Olympia Publishing.

Hutchings, R. 1968. “The Weakening of Ideological Influences uponSoviet Design.” Slavic Review 27(1): 71–84.

Jelinek, Z. 1961. The Secret of the Well-dressed Woman: The Rules ofAttractiveness and Good Taste (Tajna dobro odjevene zene: Pravilaprivlacnosti i dobrog ukusa), Zagreb: NIP.

Jowitt, K. 1992. New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction, Berkeley,CA: University of California Press.

Kelly, C. 2001. Refining Russia: Advice Literature, Polite Culture, andGender from Catherine to Yeltsin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kelly, C. and V. Volkov 1998. “Directed Desires: Kul’turnost’ and Con-sumption.” In C. Kelly and D. Shepherd (eds) Constructing RussianCulture in the Age of Revolution, 1881–1940, pp. 291–313. Oxford:Oxford University Press.

König, R. 1988. “Fashion under the real socialism” (“La moda nelsocialismo reale”). In Humanity at the Catwalk (Umanità in passerella),pp. 265-275. Milan: Longanesi & C.

Kornai, J. 1990. Vision and Reality, Market and State: Contradictionsand Dilemmas Revisited. Budapest: Corvina.

Kornai, J. 1992. The Socialist System: The Political Economy of Com-munism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kovrig, B. 1979. Communism in Hungary: From Kun to Kadar. Stanford,CA: Hoover Institution Press.

Langer, K. 1961. “Fashion and Socialist Life Style” (“Móda a socialistickyzivotni sloh”). Tvar 12(3): 65–6.

Lehmann, U. 1999. “Tigersprung: Fashioning History.” Fashion Theory3(3): 297–322.

Maskulii, A. 1958. “Making a Visit, at the Theatre, at the Concert.”Fashion Journal 1958, no. 3, pp. 34–5.

Matkovic, H. 1998. The History of Yugoslavia: A Croatian View (PovijestJugoslavije: Hrvatski pogled). Zagreb: Naklada Pavicic.

Molnar, M. 1990. From Béla Kun to János Kádár: Seventy Years ofHungarian Communism. New York and Oxford: Berg.

Ness, M. 1967. “Czechoslovaks Seen as Fashion Conscious.” ChristianScience Monitor February 10 1967.

Oblath, M. 2000. “A Bespoke Chanel Suit in Hungary in 1966.” TheCorrespondent, pp. 44–7.

Paperny, V. 1993. “Movement—Immobility.” In A. Efimova and L.Manovich (eds) Tekstura, pp. 56–69. Chicago and London: Universityof Chicago Press.

Perrot, P. 1994. Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in theNineteenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Polhemus, T. and L. Procter. 1978. Fashion and Anti-Fashion. London:Thames and Hudson.

Puhovski, Z. 1990. The Socialist Construction of Reality (Socijalistickakonstrukcija zbilje). Zagreb: Skolska knjiga.


Réczey, F., D. Pekáry and F. Gondi. 1960. Etikett, társasélet, protokol.Budapest: Minerva.

Reid, S. E. and D. Crowley. 2000. (eds) Style and Socialism: Modernityand Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe. Oxford and NewYork: Berg.

Reid, S. E. 1999. “Masters of the Earth: Gender and Destalinisation inSoviet Reformist Painting of the Khrushchev Thaw.” Gender andHistory 11(2): 276–312.

Renner, H. 1989. A History of Czechoslovakia since 1945. London andNew York: Routledge.

Simmel, G. 1997. “Fashion, Adornment and Style.” In D. Frisby and M.Featherstone (eds) Simmel on Culture, pp. 187–217. London: SagePublications.

Spalová, J. 1949a. “About New Style of Clothes” (O novy styl obleku”).Women and Fashion (Zena a moda) (Prague), 1949, no. 2.

Spalová, J. 1949b. “Elegant Will Not be Nice?” (“Elegantní nebopríjemny?”). Women and Fashion (Zena a moda) (Prague), 1949, no.2. p. 19.

Steele, V. 1993. “Chanel in Context.” In J. Ash and E. Wilson (eds) ChicThrills, pp. 118–26. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Stosic, B. 1959. “Diors are Among Us” (“Diori su medju narna”). Globus(Zagreb), no. 15, October 11 1959, pp. 40–1.

Strizhenova, T. 1991. Soviet Costume and Textiles 1917–1945. Paris:Flammarion.

Sudakevich, A. A. 1960. “Let Us Dress Smartly” (“Odevaites’ krasivo”).In G. F. Popova, and L. F. Seregina (eds) To You, Girls (Vam, devushki),pp. 207–24. Moscow: Medgiz.

Swain, G. and N. Swain 1993. Eastern Europe since 1945. London:Macmillan Press.

Thiel, E. 1979. “Fashion Creation in Socialist Society” (“Modegestaltungin der sozialistichen Gesellschaft.”) In Artists and Fashion (Künstlerund Mode), pp. 186–201. East Berlin: Henschelverlag.

Thom, F. 1989. Newspeak: The Language of Soviet Communism. Londonand Lexington, KY: The Claridge Press.

Trotskaia, T. 1959. “Parizh pokazyvaet mody.” Ogonek (Moscow), no.26, June 21 1959.

Uchalova, E. 1996. Czech Fashion 1918–1939. Prague: Olympia.Vainshtein, O. 1996. “Female Fashion: Soviet Style: Bodies of Ideology.’

In H. Goscilo and B. Holmgren (eds) Russia Women Culture, pp. 64–93. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Verdery, K. 1996. What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next. Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press.

Vesely, L. 1956. “Festival Postcard.” Woman and Fashion (Zena a móda)(Prague), no. 8, p. 24.

Voslensky, M. 1984. Nomenklatura: Anatomy of the Soviet Ruling Class.London: The Bodley Head.


Weltrusky, M 1988. “Zagreb Fashion” (“Zagrebacka moda”). In D.Helebrant (ed.) Zagreb Fashion Guide (Zagreb modni vodic). pp. 31–43. Zagreb: Zadruzna stampa.

Wilson, E. 1990. “These New Components of the Spectacle: Fashion andPostmodernism.” In R. Boyne and A. Rattansi (eds) Postmodernismand Society, pp. 209–36. London: Macmillan Education.

Zaletova, L., F. Ciofi degli Atti, and F. Panzini 1989. Costume Revolution:Textiles, Clothing and Costume of the Soviet Union in the Twenties.London: Trefoil Publications.

Zelmanovic, D. 1985. Illustrated Etiquette and Protocol (Ilustriranibonton & protokol). Zagreb: SLN/Zrinski.

Zelmanovic, D. 1963. Illustrated Etiquette: Rules on Proper Behaviour(Ilustrirani bonton: Pravila lijepog ponasanja u kuci, izvan kuce, naputu). Zagreb: Stvarnost.

Zizek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.Zsolt, P. 1995. “Fashion and Its Significance in the Hungarian Social

History of the Last Five Decades” (“A divat és jelentõsége az elmúltötven év magyar társadalomtörténetében”). Elméleti Szociológia 1995(1): 40–44.

Documents

Official Socialist Dress