FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (The MIT Press) - Hardcover

Djurdja Bartlett

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262026503 ISBN 13: 9780262026505

Publisher: MIT Press, 2010

Synopsis

The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonisma??which cast fashion as frivolous and antirevolutionarya??eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of...

About this title

Review:

A groundbreaking investigation [in which] the scope of information and analysis given is impressive. At the same time it is a readable insight into a system which profoundly affected fashion as it did every aspect of life in the Eastern Bloc--a phenomenon from our immediate past and on our doorstep which continues to fascinate.

--Selvedge

...FashionEast is a beautifully presented and seriously researched attempt to uncover how fashion worked, or didn't work, in the 72 years of the Soviet Union and the 42 years of the Eastern Bloc...When Stepanova says in 1923 that 'the clothing of today must be seen in action, ' we could say too that the history of clothing must also be 'in action, ' and, as Bartlett reminds us, not merely as a frivolous sideline to main political events, but as an important reflection of them.

--ICON (UK)

FashionEast is by far, the best source on the market concerning Communist fashion.

--Heather Vaughan, Worn Through

Smartly illustrated, fascinating and provocative.

--San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author:

Djurdja Bartlett is a Research Fellow at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

About this edition

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0262026503
• ISBN 13: 9780262026505
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 300