Beyond Espionage: Fashion under Socialism

A fashion catwalk in a steel work factory, fashion shows at an agricultural cooperative or in a housing estate in Prague: these might be rather unusual events for Western audiences, but prove that fashion had a key role under socialism. So far this aspect hasn’t been thoroughly investigated yet, but interest is growing. A good introduction to this topic is provided by the event “Beyond Espionage: Fashion under Socialism”, which is on at the Victoria & Albert Museum on Friday 31st October. Curated by researcher and lecturer at the Royal College of Art, Renate Stauss and Marketa Uhlirova, Co-founder, Director and Curator of the Fashion in Film Festival, and presented in association with BFI Southbank, the event analyses, through newsreels and documentaries from post-war East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the meaning of socialist fashion and its role in Cold War propaganda.
 
Dazed Digital: How did you choose the newsreels/documentaries for the “Beyond Espionage: Fashion under Socialism” event?

Renate Stauss: We did research on the broader theme of fashion under socialism and wanted to see how it is represented in film. We found some feature films and documentary shorts but the newsreel was the strongest form for our purpose. We tried to take the perspective of a Western viewer. Both of us are originally from the ‘East’ - I am from former GDR and Marketa is from former Czechoslovakia. So we understand the material in a different way from a Westerner. We know the context, the language, the ideological environment in which all this took place. So what we tried to do is find films showing fashion under socialism, which would communicate some of the main characteristics in a vivid way. 

Marketa Uhlirova: Although we only looked at films from these two countries, we tried to identify material that represented best the internal tensions in the fashion systems of the Eastern Bloc in a wider sense – material that reveals best the Cold War ideology.

DD: Was it difficult to find them?
MU: We worked with Bundesarchiv (Germany’s national film archive) and DEFA in Berlin and Kratky Film archive in Prague. Kratky Film is a privately owned organisation that has important holdings of all the short films made in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. They have a lot of material but are geared up to using it commercially. It wasn’t so much a question of the difficulty in finding the right films, as in convincing the organisation about the significance of showing this wonderful material – that was once state-commissioned and state-owned – in the context of public exhibition and education. We come up against this a lot with the festival.

RS: The East German archival material is very well organised and fairly easy to access. And if you want to pursue fashion under socialism further, there is an archive dedicated to fashion in the GDR and some smaller film archives/museums. All of them are helpful.

DD: Can you tell us more about the newsreels and documentaries you selected? In what ways did socialism influence fashion in post-war East Germany and Czechoslovakia?

RS: The short answer would be: in every way. The longer one would be that there was a difference between ‘official’ fashion and what was worn by the people on a daily basis. The ‘official’ fashion was heavily ideologised. The term ‘fashion’ itself was rejected as a wasteful phenomenon of Western capitalism. In the Eastern Bloc, the concept ‘clothing culture’ became important. It was supposed to serve the working woman in her newly established and equal social role. Dress was supposed to make women’s lives easier. Garments were meant to be practical, made of washable, iron-free fabrics. 90% of women in the GDR were economically active. This was a huge achievement even in today’s terms, even though it was of course fraught with ambiguity as women also took care of children and housework – so it was a double burden.
 
MU: You could say fashion – or rather clothing culture, as Renate says - was used to really drum socialism home. Fashion, as well as other areas of design, architecture and of course fine art were all embraced as important media of the Cold War propaganda. The key message in the post-war era, throughout the 1950s and spilling into the 1960s, was to promote a culture that offered civilian, everyday, no-nonsense clothes for the working man or woman, rationalised and standardised, rejecting ‘Western’ notions of luxury, glamour and extravagance. The ideal of femininity was initially radically different from that of the post-New Look era in the West. But Western fashion soon started infiltrating through the back door, it was always there in the background of ‘socialist’ fashion.

RS: Yes - you have to look at what people were actually wearing in the street: a mixture of state-prescribed clothes, which is what people could buy in the shops, and self-made clothes and clothes that was sent to them by relatives in the West. Especially in the GDR almost everyone knew someone in West Germany and the open-language border and West German television meant that Western fashion really influenced what was worn in the East.

DD: In your opinion which film is the most interesting and why?

RS: The fashion show at the agricultural cooperative is very telling, and also very funny, because it shows how seriously the regime took itself. In terms of design I like the rolling beauty salon – what a visionary concept!

MU: I am fond of the newsreel item showing a fashion show in a housing estate in Prague because it really works visually, and encapsulates the reality of ‘socialist’ fashion with all its contradictions.

DD: Are there any Western designers who are mocked in the newsreels/documentaries?

RS: You have to imagine that almost everything that was said and done in the Eastern Bloc was done in reaction to the West, and in East Germany this West was in particular West Germany. The East was constructing its identity, in terms of politics, economy but also culture, in relation to the West – to be different, to be better. We are showing some examples of the East mocking the West. I have seen German footage of Parisian fashion shows commented on in a very sarcastic and cynical way – but it was impossible to get the rights for showing it this time.
 
MU: The Czech documentary ‘Attention Please: Fashion’ is basically an explicit attempt to discredit Western fashion, and everything that it represents. It is hilarious, even today, as it picks on the most outlandish extravagances like goldfish swimming in shoe platforms or Japanese hats based on Soviet satellites orbiting around the head. Specifically, it names Dior and ridicules his insistence on luxury. Having said all this, it’s also interesting to turn your question around and look at the Eastern Bloc fashion through the eyes of the West. News agencies like Reuters regularly brought stories about fashion in the Eastern Bloc, and this of course included a number of newsreels.
Of particular interest were the fashion congresses held throughout the socialist countries, and the evident agenda of the Western media was to show how Eastern Europe is finally picking up on consumer and luxury production, or how it is showing clear influences of the West, namely countries like France and Italy. But the fact that the West didn’t feel the need to mock the East, as much as it was the case on the other side, is in itself interesting because it shows us something about the nature of the power-relation between the two.

DD: Are there any other FFF events we should check out and will you in case explore the fashion under socialism theme in other events?
MU: We will be repeating this programme in a slightly different form at BFI Southbank in early January as par of their costume interpreter series. Check our website www.fashioninfilm.com nearer the time!

“Beyond Espionage: Fashion under Socialism”, Friday 31st October 2008, Victoria & Albert Museum