The Totalitarian State and Fashion in the Twentieth Century

doi:10.1017/9781108862349.007

25 - The Totalitarian State and Fashion in the Twentieth Century

from Part IV - Fashion, Modernism, and Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2023

Djurdja Bartlett

Edited by

Christopher Breward ,

Beverly Lemire and

Giorgio Riello

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Christopher Breward: Affiliation:
National Museums Scotland
Beverly Lemire: Affiliation:
University of Alberta
Giorgio Riello: Affiliation:
European University Institute, Florence

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Summary

This chapter focuses on the three phenomena of socialist fashion – socialist official fashion, everyday fashion, and alternative fashion – and argues that they were embedded in different spheres of socialist societies and served by different concepts of time. The initial Bolshevik attempts at utopia in the early 1920s had rejected fashion. It belonged to the past, and not to the new, rationalized and ordered world that the early Bolsheviks were attempting to build. But fashion received official approval in the Stalinist Soviet Union from the mid-1930s on. Born in the central dress institution, House of Prototypes in Moscow, the socialist fashion developed within a highly centralized system and its Five-Year Plans. These were introduced as a part of the Stalinist industrialization drive, designed to raise technical and organizational levels of the backward Russian textile and clothing industries. As the Soviet Union tightened its grip on Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, the countries in the region nationalized their textile and clothing industries, and central dress institutions were set up to coordinate the activities of those industries and to design new clothing.

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Global History of Fashion
From the Nineteenth Century to the Present
, pp. 890 - 933

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862349.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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