Russian Constructivism in Dress and Textiles

Abstract

Constructivism was embedded in immense political and social changes brought about by the Bolshevik Revolution. Its appearance in 1919 resulted from the merger of two parallel but very different artistic movements: futurism and proletkult. While futurism rebelled against bourgeois culture and lifestyle in a series of anarchistic practices, proletkult was a politically motivated mass movement that promoted a separate culture for the proletariat. In this context, for the constructivists, fashion was a part of the petit-bourgeois prerevolutionary culture named byt. In prerevolutionary Russia, fashion was exclusively identified with the extravagant and expensive dresses of Western origin, made from lace and feathers, silk and velvet. In a country where the destitute masses dressed in cheap and often ragged traditional or secondhand clothes, fashionable dress that only the rich could afford accentuated class and social differences. Close politically to the Bolshevik project, the constructivists were particularly fierce in their critique of fashion.