Stalinist fashions

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Stalinist Fashions:

Sounds like an oxymoron doesn't it? While in St. Petersburg, I was invited to the Academy of Art Library one day and I decided to find out if they had anything on fashion in Russia after 1917. You see, costume museums and costume books in Russia, just stop dead in showing the history of fashion after 1917. But I knew for a fact that Russians wore clothes in the Twentieth Century so I looked anyway. This is a bit of what I found that day:

Cover of a Fall/Winter 1936-7 clothing catalog seemingly for a Leningrad factory or store selling mail order to Kazan (!?) The catalog shows men's, women's, and children's coats, and some women's and children's dresses. All very ordinary, in B&W drawings. No prices are listed. Probably it was a catalog used by stores to order from the factory. 30 pages, 28 of them with illustrations.

Here are two of the nicer coats: #322 on pg. 3 (left) seems to say it is in colored fabrics with a natural fur collar. #379 on page 4 is also in colored fabrics but with an artificial fur collar.

These rather nifty drawings come from out of a 1934 fashion design theory textbook. Some of the textbook illustrations use the English word "life" in the drawings so some or all of the book may be a translation of an English or American book. However I've never seen this, or the drawings below in a 1930's Western text book, so the word "life" may be used as a design motif, as Russians were, and are, inclined to do with foreign printed words.

This lower drawing I've also got reproduced in a recent costume design theory book, that is only about 5 years old, so it still is part of the curriculum.

This drawing, as well as the next three, are from a book Cutting Simple Clothing for Women Children and Men from 1956 by S.K.Vinogradov and A.M. Lebedev. It's one of the most horrible, obtuse, and over complicated mathematical measuring and cutting systems I've seen. It is a great deal more complex than necessary for such simple clothing.

For example there are 2 and a half pages of math and instructions for making an ordinary circle skirt, and it requires algebra, mind you, for the equation!!! And it takes 9 pages of instructions for the simple dress above.

This is a fairly typical jacket for a man of the time, it is a sort of cross between a good proletarian factory workers jacket on the front, and an English Norfolk jacket sort-of "sporting coat" on the back. These were usually made up in shades of blue and grey canvas for going to work in town, or sometimes wide-wale corduroy for going to the country.

These are boys and girls school uniforms from the book. School uniforms pretty much stayed as they were before the Revolution until almost now. Girls uniforms consisted of a black dress with a Edwardian style pin tucked white apron, boys had a Russian revival style bloused tunic.