Snapshot: Lithuanian urban dress, 1940s to twenty-first century

In 1944, Soviet Russia annexed Lithuania, and it became one of the republics forming the Soviet Union. Lithuanian fashion establishments that existed from before the war were nationalized, and the new economic system of centralized production and distribution of clothes was introduced. Following the Soviet model, the Lithuanian central fashion house was established in Vilnius in 1954, in order to control the design and production of clothes. However, Lithuania, as well as Estonia and Latvia, had enjoyed fashion and its rituals during the interwar period, in contrast to the disappearance of fashion as an everyday practice in the Soviet Union following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Drawing on their pre–World War II sophisticated dress cultures, designers within the three Baltic central fashion houses were not only creative but also better informed than the rest of the Soviet Union about world fashion trends. Fashion magazines published by those fashion houses—Banga (Wave; published in Vilnius), Siluet (Silhouette; published in Tallinn), and Rigas Modes (Riga fashions; published in Riga)— printed images of stylish and fashionable dresses and provided regular information on Western fashion. Since Western fashion publications were not available, these fashion magazines were popular and sought out in other parts of the Soviet Union as well.

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