The Constructivist Sartorial Utopia and Its Revolutionary Potential: Then and Now

In the early 1920s, the new geometrical lines of the Constructivist proposed dress and textile designs were a sartorial expression of the sweeping Bolshevik political programme and its rejection of the past following the 1917 October Revolution. The essay explores the trajectory of the Constructivist revolutionary ideas, and their various sartorial expressions, in both political and commercial variants. Its political versions appeared within the movement known as International Modernism in the late 1920s, from Bauhaus to the Czech functionalist modernism, but are also present in work of some contemporary fashion designers who draw on the original Constructivist ideals. On the one hand, fashion could only denigrate the noble utopian ideals. On the other hand, the Constructivist-inspired collections by the leading western fashion designers have time and again showed that the aspiration to utopia nonetheless survives.