The Frills the World Can’t See: Clothing in Soviet Pre-war and Wartime Cinema

Abstract

Soviet cinema of the 1930s and 1940s seems to be an interesting case for the discussion of the interaction between cinema and fashion. While Hollywood cinema of this time was one of the main agents of production and transmission of the fashion standards and trends, in Soviet films subjects of fashionable clothes and behavior, style, etc. had a reduced significance. In this paper, I am going to examine the phenomenon of “invisibility” of the clothes in the films of “grand style,” its causes and its significance for Stalinist culture. In the consideration of the development of Soviet fashion, I draw upon the works on Soviet modernization and the politics of “kulturnost’” (Sh. Fitzpatrick, V. Volkov, etc.). In this context, I will discuss several subjects that seem to be significant for the representation of clothes and fashion on the screen: appearance of the consumption/presentation of the clothes in Soviet films of the time (shops, festivals, theaters, gifts, etc.); significance of the clothes and the ways of their screening for the social, political, and moral identification of characters; meanings of a uniform and a traditional folk costume in films of the 1930s and 1940s.