Stars on Screen and Red Carpet

In this essay, Bartlett explores fashions and film costumes through the looks of film actresses on the screen and in their public life during the 1920s and 1930s. Politically and aesthetically, these two decades differ considerably, and I investigate how the different political circumstances – the Bolshevik rule following the 1917 Revolution, the introduction of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the early 1920s, and the rise of Stalinism at the beginning of the 1930s – informed different styles in dress and looks. The names of costume designers were traditionally not listed in the film credits. Instead, the tasks of production designer, or film artist (khudozhnik), equally covered scenography, dress and make-up. Under the economically and politically difficult circumstances in the 1920s, and later, in the different, but even more challenging 1930s, the costumes nevertheless exhibited high quality and precision, and visually enriched and contextualized film narratives. In order to explore these issues, Bartlett observes film costumes in the Soviet romantic comedies and musicals within the context of sartorial cultures of the 1920s and 1930s and their practitioners, taking into account the politics and ideologies that informed them, as well as the audiences who highly enjoyed those films.