(1997). Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. History: Reviews of New Books: Vol. 26, No. 1, pp. 5-5.

Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961

Barbara Einhorn. Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women's Movements in East Central Europe. London and New York: Verso, 1993. 280pp. ISBN 0-86091-615-4 (paper).

Cinderella Goes to Market: Citizenship, Gender and Women s Movements in East Central Europe

Post-Soviet nostalgia, generally understood as a sentimental longing forthe Soviet past, has penetrated deep into many branches of Russian popular culture in the post-1989 period. The present study ...

/pdf/mediated-post-soviet-nostalgia-1bcfkecrwg.pdf

Mediated Post-Soviet Nostalgia

In this study I examine fashion blogging as a subfield of the field of fashion media by using a Bourdieusian theoretical framework. After identifying the steps of the “career” of bloggers, my aim is to highlight the cultural, economic, and social resources (forms of capital) that bloggers use to access the field, and the strategies they mobilize to shape their relations with other agents within it. The empirical terrain which is investigated to answer these questions is the Italian fashion blogosphere; thirty-four in-depth interviews with (mainly female) fashion bloggers and six with key informants (fashion journalists and website editors) were collected between 2011 and 2014.Moreover, a more general aim is to question common-sense interpretations (blogs as a revolutionary tool in fashion communication and as a new fashion marketing frontier) to give a normalized picture of fashion blogging as a progressively autonomous social field, governed by its own laws. Through an in-depth analysis of the It...

“Stumbling on the Heels of My Blog”: Career, Forms of Capital, and Strategies in the (Sub)Field of Fashion Blogging

During the second and third decades of the twentieth century, the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev brought theatre and dance to the forefront of contemporary culture. Diaghilev’s dance company, ...

Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes 1909–1929

The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion Official antagonism—which cast fashion as frivolous and antirevolutionary—eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism

Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores—mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty

Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women’s magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes’ fear of change and need for control It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end

FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism

Publisher's description of the volume:

The fashion media is in the midst of deep social and technological change. Including a broad range of case studies, from fashion plates to fashion films, and from fashion magazines to fashion blogs, this ground-breaking book provides an up-to-date examination of the role and significance of this field.

Winner of the PCA/ACA Ray and Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection, Fashion Media includes chapters written by international scholars covering topics from historic magazine cultures and contemporary digital innovations to art and film, exploring themes such as gender, ethnicity, design, taste and authorship.

Highlighting the complexity of processes that bind design, design, technology, society and identity together, Fashion Media will be of be essential reading for students of fashion studies, cultural studies, visual culture studies, design history, communications and art and design practice and theory.

This volume was co-edited by Djurdja Bartlett, Shaun Cole and Agnes Rocamora, who also authored the introduction.

Fashion Media: Past and Present

Le champ de la mode a depuis peu vu l’apparition d’une nouvelle forme de communication digitale : le blogging. Il existe maintenant une multitude de blogs independants de mode. Les redacteurs et leurs audiences y privilegient un ton informel, le quotidien, favorisant ainsi une representation de la mode comme pratique ordinaire mais neanmoins creative, un sujet de conversation propre a la mise en place de liens digitaux.

Blogs de mode : les nouveaux espaces du discours de mode

Vogue arrived in Russia as a representative of the most advanced market capitalism and its advertising and retail strategies in 1998. Yet, many commentators doubted its chances of surviving under the conditions of 1998 economic collapse in an alien and new culture. The arrival of Vogue announced a change in the politics of style, imagery, gender representations and consumption practices. However, the Russian version of Vogue was itself influenced by the former socialist cultural patterns. This article identifies a series of negotiations between the well-established international Vogue brand and post-socialist Russian society, which eventually shaped it into a Russian product. Vogue's politics of style was intended not only to promote its advertisers, but also to protect the allure of their image in socially unfavourable surroundings. Vogue's educational efforts towards its wealthy but un-sophisticated readership were also informed by that task. In order to fulfil it, Vogue connected the new economic capital possessed by the Russian super rich with a new symbolic capital. Vogue's presentation of luxurious dresses and accessories also allowed for a new social context for luxury. The introduction of a type of femininity that would suit the most refined requirements of Vogue's advertisers was a more complex task. Vogue's concept of femininity was established by partially recognizing the influence of the previous cultural patterns on post-socialist practices. Yet, Vogue affirmed a concept of sexualized femininity following its own aesthetics, re-claiming that sort of femininity from the demi-monde world, and granting it respectability and credibility.

In Russia, At Last and Forever: The First Seven Years of Russian Vogue

Socialist regimes always had a stormy and hostile relationship with fashion. The early Bolsheviks rejected even the word “fashion”, and insisted on functional and undecorated clothing, and the post-war East European socialist regimes initially embraced that ideology and officially rejected western fashion. A new ideological turn took place after Khrushchev affirmed his rule in 1956, and attacked excessive Stalinist aesthetics. Official attitudes towards western fashion mellowed in both Russia and East European socialist countries. But with neither tradition nor market, and aspiring to control fashion changes inside their centralized fashion systems, the socialist regimes could neither keep up with nor embrace western fashion trends. In this paper I offer an interpretation of that encounter between socialism and western fashion, which occurred between 1958 and 1968. It resulted in the sartorial phenomenon that I call “official socialist dress” which was connected to the creation of a new socialist middle class by the socialist regimes. In practice, however, official socialist dress had little to do with everyday reality. Queues, shortages and poor quality supply in the shops continued, confirming in differing degrees the socialist regimes' domination of both the time and the consumption of their citizens. Official socialist dress was an ideological construct, a discourse channeled through the state-owned media. The aesthetics of official socialist dress was informed by simple and moderate lines. I call that conventional style “socialist good taste”. By advocating modesty, and suggesting creativity within standardization, socialist good taste served the new stylistic synthesis of proletarian asceticism and petit bourgeois prettiness. While official socialist dress and socialist good taste eased the introduction of western fashion into the socialist systems, they were at the same time fatal factors that arrested the development of a genuine socialist fashion in the decades to follow. All the distortions that characterized socialist fashion were already transparent in the conservative aesthetics of official socialist dress from the end of the 1950s: an ontological anxiety about the fluidity of time, a pathological fear of change, the hierarchical levels of decision making in planned economies, the negligence of the market, the confused relationship towards western fashion, cultural autarky, and a lack of experience informed by an earlier ideological rejection of fashion's history.
As the first comparative and historical analysis of socialist dress codes, the paper is based on in-depth field research of a variety of documentary sources including women’s magazines, art journals, picture weeklies, political dailies and satirical magazines. The analysis crosses the boundaries between different disciplines, drawing on ideas from fashion studies, cultural anthropology, critical theory, gender studies, political science and studies on the everyday in socialism. Embedded in this broad theoretical foundation, the paper analyses the concepts of time, class, taste and gender in socialism in relation to dress. The investigation of the ideologised uses of these catagories facilitates a comparison of Western fashions with their socialist counterparts. By analysing dress practices which were informed by different ideological and organisational principles, the paper broadens the field of fashion studies that had previously been exclusively organised around Western fashion and its practices.

Let Them Wear Beige: The Petit-Bourgeois World of Official Socialist Dress

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