If on opening your wardrobe you still think you’ve got nothing to wear, think how it was for the Soviet women. Only 20 years ago, being a fashionista was a heroic act requiring connections and tailors rather than fashion blogs, boutiques and a wallet.
If on opening your wardrobe you still think you’ve got nothing to wear, think how it was for the Soviet women. Only 20 years ago, being a fashionista was a heroic act requiring connections and tailors rather than fashion blogs, boutiques and a wallet.
Necessity was the mother of invention. No other saying, perhaps, better describes the strict fashion diet in the USSR.
The market deficit for just about anything from sausage to books ravaged the closets, where lavender bags, needed to fight moths, were hanging lonely without any fur coats to protect.
Black and brown were the colors of the time, with red only available on the hammer-and-sickle flag. But women were ingenious enough to find solutions.
“We tried to get by in many ways by sewing our own clothes, buying on the black market, or snatching fabric for crazy amounts of money from tourists,” said fashion-lover Olga Basetskaya, recalling the 1980s.
Soviet fashion served ideology, not people.
Of course, there were magazines and fashion houses, but they were printed only for visual consumption and exhibitions.
“It was impossible to buy anything in Soviet shops. Even if something had been imported into the country, it would have been gray, uniform, boring.Sometimes we even altered our mother‘s old clothes.The highest form of art was to buy a man’s shirt and tailor it for a woman. The fabric of male shirts was for some reason better.”
Those who didn’t know how to sew had to use atelier, or tailor’s shops. But even that wasn’t easy – Soviet dressmakers used to open for new orders only once a week.
“People would arrive at 5 a.m., forming a long queue,” said Irina Ivahnin, a former master tailor at Zaporozhye atelier. “If someone wanted to order 10 things at once, it would mean that there were only 40 orders left for other customers because we couldn’t make more.”
Those who couldn’t afford tailors were resigned to grey pullovers and black skirts from central malls, called TSUMs. “They used to make clothes as if they were for the dead,” recalled fashion expert and historian Zoya Zvinyatkovska.
Soviet fashion served ideology, not people. Of course, there were magazines and fashion houses, but they were printed only for visual consumption and exhibitions.
And so a Soviet woman had to discover the black market and rely on a friend of a friend who miraculously brought more than one skirt from her educational visit abroad.
When the first Hollywood films sneaked into the Soviet Union, they brought the spirit of change and a cult of the human body. At the same time in the late 1980s, Soviet cinema surprised its citizens by showing half-naked, loose women onscreen in “Malenkaya Vera” (Little Vera) and “Interdevochka” (A Foreign Girl).
Soviet prostitutes in the 1989 film ‘Interdevochka’ showcase how Soviet women dressed when they had money and connections.
(all-stars.su)
“People always compared themselves to who they saw onscreen. In this way, the era of the mini skirt, the see-through blouse and skin-tight, very short dresses entered Ukraine,” recalled Peter Mamchich, a designer and teacher at the Kyiv National University of Technology and Design.
In a way, it seems that the same style of “the shorter, the better” still rules the streets. But luckily, Ukrainians seem to have done away with crimson jackets.
Men who managed to scramble up the social ladder had to demonstrate their wealth with raspberry-colored jackets over black t-shirts and golden chains.
China was to blame for this fashion crime.
Huge batches of Alaska coats and colorful leggings (footless tights) flooded the street markets. The colors were gaudy, the quality was poor but what amazing change did these strips of clothes achieve for the women.
Sexy, confident, beautiful – meet a new Ukrainian woman.
Actress Elena Yakovleva played a nurse by daytime and a prostitute by night in “Interdevochka,” a cult movie about Soviet women who were ready for anything to live a decent life. (all-stars.su)
In 1993, United Colors of Benetton opened its first store on Khreshchatyk Street. Queuing up for hours sometimes, people waited to get in just to browse if they couldn’t afford to buy. In 1997, Ukrainian Fashion Week unrolled its first catwalk in Kyiv, which lasted only three days and showcased 13 collections.
By March 2011, the show lasted well over a week and presented 50 collections. Among the first designers to sweep Ukrainian fashionistas were Victor Anisimov, Alain Vorozhbit, Victoria Gres, Lily Pustovit and Sergei Byzov.
All of them are still in fashion today.
They, however, owe much of their popularity to the Internet, when people could finally learn about fashion from numerous sources and express themselves freely in blogs.
“The Internet changed everything. There is no longer ‘fashion’ per se, there is style,” said Alessandra Daynelli, an Italian fashion consultant and buyer. Ukrainians who wear international Zara, Desigual and H&M brands are no exception.
But if you feel nostalgic for Soviet head scarves and knitted jackets, you can still find them in your grandmother’s closets or flea markets. They are, however, the type of history that most people would rather forget about.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliya Raskevich can be reached at [email protected]
