"This book explores Cold War fashion in all its aspects, ranging from innovations in materials to the cybernetic visions of the 1960s, from the bikini to the spacesuit, vinyl radiation suits to high-tech jewellery, Paco Rabanne to Barbarella. Set in the context of art, film, science and design, Pavitt explores how the image of the body was shaped by Cold War concerns - atomic anxieties, the space race, technological developments and the first forays into 'hyper-reality.' With a stunning selection of images alongside military, political and scientific research, the book shows how counter-cultural theories and experiences in the later 1960s shaped an alternative view of the 'Cold War Body'."--BOOK JACKET.

The Soviet Union was not renowned for its fashionable clothing. However, after the World War II the Soviet Government opened several parallel organizations of fashion design with fashion houses and ateliers all over the country. The post-war decades witnessed hot debates on destalinization, economic and social reforms and the increasing importance of the public opinion. The cold war and the peaceful competition between the two systems left their marks on clothes fashion. Fashion offers a good insight into Soviet economic planning. Despite increasing opulence, Soviet consumers were not satisfied. Soviet experts on fashion propagated small series of fashionable clothing and the opening of boutiques which never seriously challenged industrial mass production. Using a great variety of unique historical sources the book analyzes the changing economic, social and cultural conditions of Soviet fashion which faced many problems but had real achievements to show too.

A richly illustrated, comprehensive study of fashion under socialism, from state-sponsored prototypes to unofficial imitations of Paris fashion. The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism—which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary—eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores—mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.

This dissertation explores Soviet fashion's international interactions, reception, and evolution during the Cold War. In the late 1950s, fashion began to play an important role in the competition over living standards with the West, reflecting the Soviet Union's commitment to socialist values, embrace of inclusivity, and artistic and industrial productivity. At the same time, fashion helped to foster cultural exchange in ways that transcended the East-West divide. Soviet designers followed global trends, but they became known for their national designs too. As Soviet fashion's reputation continued to grow, it debuted on the world market in 1966 as an export. A year later, Moscow became a fashion capital of sorts when it hosted the International Fashion Festival and Clothing Exhibition. Thereafter, the Soviet Union continued to promote sartorial ties internationally, despite deteriorating economic conditions at home. These connections helped to establish Moscow's contemporary status in the fashion world.Utilizing a diverse range of archival and periodical sources, such as exhibition comments books, official reports, women's and fashion magazines, and newspapers, this dissertation analyzes Soviet fashion from a variety of perspectives over the course of approximately thirty years, while also considering its legacy today. Beyond the Soviet perspective, American, British, and French interpretations paint a complex and nuanced picture of Soviet style that reflects not only Cold War stereotypes and misperceptions, but also the ways in which fashion promoted mutual understanding as a universal concern. The analysis offers some comparative insight into how both the East and the West propagated and perceived fashion in the Cold War, and it looks at the role that women's bodies and appearances played in the competition because of their connection to national identity and clothing production and consumption. This dissertation contributes to the scholarship on the cultural Cold War, challenging notions of Western cultural predominance, and studies of Soviet, socialist, Russian, and international fashion.

In this cultural history of the origins of the Cold War, John Fousek argues boldly that American nationalism provided the ideological glue for the broad public consensus that supported U.S. foreign policy in the Cold War era. From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, the United States waged cold war against the Soviet Union not primarily in the name of capitalism or Western civilization--neither of which would have united the American people behind the cause--but in the name of America. Through close readings of sources that range from presidential speeches and popular magazines to labor union debates and the African American press, Fousek shows how traditional nationalist ideas about national greatness, providential mission, and manifest destiny influenced postwar public culture and shaped U.S. foreign policy discourse during the crucial period from the end of World War II to the beginning of the Korean War. Ultimately, he says, in the atmosphere created by apparently unceasing international crises, Americans rallied around the flag, eventually coming to equate national loyalty with global anticommunism and an interventionist foreign policy.