‘Politics and Dresses: Facts and Fiction in Nadezhda Lamanova’s Career’

The juxtaposition of the extraordinary glamour of Nadezhda Lamanova’s pre-1917 fashion designs with her dedicated post-revolutionary service to the Bolsheviks has contributed to her mythical status in Russia, in which facts routinely mix with fictional accounts.

Relying on a meticulous reading of pre-1917 arts and applied arts journals, as well as contemporary memoirs, Bartlett contextualizes Lamanova’s pre-revolutionary designs within the contemporary Russian and European modernist arts movements, and forges the link between her, customarily strictly divided, pre-and-post-1917 careers.

The analysis of Lamanova’s post-revolutionary activities – based on original archival research in the Manuscript Department of the Bakhrushin Theatre Museum in Moscow and the Russian State Archive for Humanities (RGALI) – show not only the dramatic changes in her career, but also the importance that design of a new socialist form of dress held for the Bolsheviks.

Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)

This paper is part of the panel 'Contextualizing Dress in Utopian, Artistic and Commercial Cultures, 1890s-1920s':
The Panel explores the role of dress in forging a new relationship between peoples and objects in the fields of utopia, the arts and commerce in the late nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century. Dress mediated between utopian ideals and consumerist practices in those politically, socially and culturally rapidly changing times.

The Reform Dress Movement started outside the contemporary fashion system, as a pan-European idea to simplify women’s clothing in line with new scientific knowledge about the human body. It was eventually absorbed into the fashion industry, and the German scientist and entrepreneur Gustav Jaeger played one of the leading roles in that process. As shown in Tatlin’s dress designs, the Bolshevik Utopia similarly drew on the ideas of simplicity, ease of movement and comfort. Operating exclusively in the field of fashion, Nadezhda Lamanova embraced the Reform dress ideals and the lines of its simple, corset-free dresses in her pre-revolutionary career. When in the 1920s categories such as functionality and simplicity increasingly migrated from the avant-garde arts into mainstream fashion, Lamanova adopted this fashion trend while simultaneously fulfilling the Bolshevik ideals of a new dress for the masses.

The proposed papers observe the dynamics between these disparate fields, as expressed by their equal determination to turn the contemporary crisis of the object into a new relationship between person and thing, their modernist concerns with the fluid gender roles, as well as their shared preference for a new, simple and comfortable dress design.

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