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Early Soviet Dilemmas on Dress
Throughout the 1920s, the Soviet urban population was surrounded by
cubism, futurism, Bauhaus, jazz, commerce, films, and advertising. These
radical expressions of Western modernity took place against the background of sweeping change brought about by the Bolshevik revolution.
The modernist issues that engaged the West, from a crisis in the representation of woman to a crisis in the relationship between subject and
object, were even more radicalized in the highly ideological, yet in many
ways modernist, environment of the Soviet 1920s. The Soviet relationship with fashion embodied all the contradictions of the postrevolutionary utopian fervor. While it opposed fashion as a commercialized and
gendered practice, the new regime frenetically supported avant- garde
artistic dress projects and invested its hopes in highly impractical projects that brought together traditional crafts and high technologies. In
everyday life, the commercialized environment of the New Economic
Policy (NEP) enabled fashion to return briefly to the Soviet Union.
While the NEP woman adopted luxurious Western dress practices, and
thus was an alien in a new Bolshevik country, the socialist urban woman
worker adjusted Western fashion trends to the new reality and her own
position within it. Her dress attempted to reconcile Bolshevik utopia
with its counterpart, Western modernity.
Clothed in a Russian Peasant Skirt
On a poster entitled “Under the Red Star, Together with Men, Let’s Frighten the Bourgeoisie,” a squadron of women workers and peasants in wide black skirts and long red aprons
threateningly march toward a single bourgeois man. Dressed in formal evening wear and
sporting a huge, well- fed belly, the bourgeois is already on the ground, trying unsuccessfully to escape the proletarian women’s wrath. Their broad shoulders, broad hips, and prominent breasts owe their shape equally to the strength of the Nietzschean superman and to
the softness of the countryside woman. With muscles adding strong and robust armor, that
large female body was large enough to embody a traditional peasant woman and a new
Bolshevik woman simultaneously. One iconographic detail—the way they tied their scarves
on their heads—differentiates the women workers from peasant women. A scarf tied below
the chin continued to represent a traditional peasant woman, while the dynamic working
woman tied her scarf at the back of her neck. Otherwise, in that poster, the women workers and the peasant women have the same large body, clothed in long, wide, peasant- style
skirts. Symbolically, the women’s large, muscular bodies and their unadorned faces were
required both for the physically demanding role of building up the new world and for the
destruction of the previous bourgeois culture (fig. 1.1).
The Bolsheviks’ condemnation of the past presupposed that the present reality would
soon be replaced by a new world, inhabited by New Men and New Women modeled on
the Nietzschean superman.1 The iconography of a strong and harmonious body complemented the broader Bolshevik goal of mastering nature. In the mid- nineteenth century,
Charles Baudelaire and Karl Marx had developed ideas which later informed the opposing
conceptualizations of modernity in the capitalist West and the socialist East.2 Baudelaire
argued that nature was vulgar and that human beings should rise above it through the
aesthetic artificiality of dressing up. He praised cosmetics because it transformed a crude
natural woman into a beautiful creature superior to nature. For him, fashion was a permanent and repeated attempt to reform nature (Baudelaire 1964, 32– 33). In contrast, the robust
and unadorned Bolshevik superwoman drew on Marx’s theory of revolutionary practice,
which would abolish all dualities and alienations between man and nature, and between
man and woman. These ideas were ontologically rooted in the eighteenth- century idea of
a lost paradise (fig. 1.2).
Made- up women dressed in fashionable clothes had no place in the new socialist world,
and so the fashion magazines that had been published before the revolution were all abolished. The first Bolshevik women’s magazine Rabotnitsa (Working woman), published by
the official women’s organization Zhenotdel from 1923,3 displayed the same cover throughout its first year of publication: a woman worker in a red headscarf holding a banner emblazoned with the name of the magazine so that it unfurls over the chimneys of a large
industrial city. Throughout the 1920s, covers showed female exemplary workers or depicted
revolutionary topics. The magazine dealt with a set of broad themes of interest to the new
socialist woman: politics, science, workplace, history, and literature. Fashion and grooming
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were excluded from Rabotnitsa, as they were identified with the overthrown bourgeois cultural and commercial heritage. On propaganda posters, large women in long, wide skirts
displaced the earlier prerevolutionary images of art nouveau– style women. While they were
ideologically loyal, however, the antimodernist appearance of these women was an inappropriate visual statement for the new, forward- looking state and the new women who would
embody it.
Opposing Fashion in Modernist Clothes
In contrast to the images of large women wrapped in peasant- style clothes which appeared
in Rabotnitsa and on the early Soviet posters, the constructivists’ visual language bore striking similarities to the body shapes and dress proposals typical of the capitalist West in the
1920s. The leading constructivists, Liubov’ Popova and Varvara Stepanova, were well versed
in cubist artistic practices and relied on genuinely cubist devices—geometry and flatness—
to develop their visions of the New Woman and her dress.4 Popova’s theater costume for
Actor N 5 in the 1922 play The Magnanimous Cuckold mirrored the dress of the proletarian woman worker in the poster “Under the Red Star, Together with Men, Let’s Frighten
the Bourgeoisie.” Popova, however, deconstructed the traditional image of a curvaceous
peasant body dressed in wide skirts, replacing it with geometricized and flattened versions
of both dress and body. Stepanova designed geometric overalls for the play The Death of
Tarelkin in the same year. Both Popova and Stepanova called their theater costumes prozodezhda (production clothing),5 and were guided by functional constructivist aesthetics and
by biomechanics—Meyerhold’s system of actor training. Popova intended her geometrically cut and unadorned prozodezhda not only to sartorially correspond to a Taylorized,
mechanized theatrical gesture, but also to be worn by actors during rehearsals and even in
their daily life. Both set designs and costumes in the plays The Magnanimous Cuckold and
The Death of Tarelkin received enthusiastic critical and public acclaim when the plays premiered in 1922. In his constructivist cry against decorativeness in theater, Vladimir Mass
claimed that the public wanted prozodezhda instead of ornamental costumes on the stage:
“They have fallen out of love with [Lev] Bakst and have fallen in love with prozodezhda;
they have left [Aleksandra] Ekster and are increasingly courting the Constructor Popova”
(Mass 1922, 8) (figs. 1.3, 1.4).
But Stepanova went further. Staying true to the constructivist ideals, she decided to take
prozodezhda out of the experimental environment of the theater and into everyday life.
In her programmatic article “Today’s Dress: Prozodezhda,” published in the constructivist journal Lef (Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv, Journal of the left front of the arts) in 1923,
she envisioned the modernist future of dress and its liberatory potential, and advocated
mass- produced and simplified clothes: “Clothing must cease to be craft- produced in favour of mass industrial production” (Stepanova 1923, 65). For Stepanova, the new industrial
production would bring transparency to the relationship between the finished product and
its manufacture, by revealing all the secrets behind a dress: “The stitching of a garment,
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FIGURE 1.1
N. Valerianov, poster, “Under the
Red Star, Together with Men,
Let’s Frighten the Bourgeoisie,” 1925.
FIGURE 1.2
Rabotnitsa, Moscow (1923, no. 1), cover.
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its buttoning, etc., need to be exposed . . . the stitching of a sewing machine industrializes
the production of a dress and deprives it of its secrets” (ibid.). Stepanova’s Lef article was
accompanied by a modernist drawing of sports clothing that geometricized both the body
and the garment (fig. 1.5).6
By revealing the mechanics of dress, Stepanova’s 1924 drawing of a woman’s prozodezhda
was consistent with the simple and functional aesthetics promoted in her Lef article. The
outfit’s monochrome appearance was interrupted by visible stitching that accentuated its
large pockets, waistline, and seams. In its flatness and overall economy of style, this prozodezhda was similar to the tuta, one- piece overalls that the Italian futurist Thayaht had
launched in 1919, as well as to fashionable cubist- style Western dresses (fig. 1.6).
The constructivists shared with their Western contemporaries an urge for change, a drive
toward novelty, and an appreciation of innovation. However, while sophisticated haute couture belonged to the field of fashion production, and Thayaht flirted with fashionability
by smartly accessorizing his tuta, the constructivists opposed bourgeois styles. In the first
issue of Lef, the fiercest constructivist theoretician Sergei Tret’iakov emphasized that “the
question of a rational dress could not be left to a fashion magazine which dictates to the
masses the will of the capitalist manufacturers” (Tret’iakov 1923b, 202). Promoting prozodezhda in her Lef article, Stepanova stressed: “Fashion that psychologically reflects a way
of life, customs and aesthetic taste gives way to programmed clothing . . . which is tested
only through the process of working in it. . . . The clothing of today must be seen in action;
outside of this it is unimaginable” (Stepanova 1923, 65). Embedded in modernist aesthetics,
Stepanova’s radicalism was not visual but lay in her ideological claim that the previous field
of fashion—including production, retail, and dress practices—should be completely abolished. Arguing that “shop windows containing wax mannequins wearing various designs . . .
are only an antiquated aesthetic phenomenon,” she dismissed the role of fashionable dress
as commodity. By insisting that prozodezhda should renounce decoration in favor of comfort, Stepanova negated the previous history of fashion: “Any decorative detail is abolished
with the following slogan: the comfort and functionality of clothing must be linked to a
specific productive function” (ibid.).
The seductive objects of capitalism lacked the transparency that the constructivists advocated. For Aleksandr Rodchenko, Western commodities were “decorated on the outside, and
they coldly decorated Paris, but on the inside, like black slaves, they concealed catastrophe”
(Rodchenko 1982, 96).7 Indeed, as he observed during his visit to Paris in 1925, although
modernist Parisian dresses offered outfits that were easy to copy and mass- produce, luxury
and privilege were sewn into their seams, well hidden behind the simplicity and functionality of their cuts and behind the “poverty” of their new fabrics, such as jersey. In contrast, Rodchenko wanted to establish a radically new relationship between the socialist subject and the
world of objects, in which an object would never again be a commodity, a result of an alienated and exploitative labor, but would be “a friend” and “a comrade.” He dreamed of a new
interactive relationship in which “man and object would talk to each other” (ibid., 95– 96)—
a result he believed possible only in the “simple and healthy” East (ibid., 89). Drawing on
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