Can an affinity for Fashion and Socialist ideologies coexist ?

Having a bit of free time can provoke pensive thoughts. Which got me thinking how would fashion and consumerism work in a socialist society? A socialist society would have to come from the ashes of a capitalist society. Maybe people would still want to buy new clothes, and maybe that's not a bad thing? Maybe the designer would be working directly with the manufacturing workers, who then sell it directly to the consumer? I scoured around the internet to find at least a bit of an insight into these questions to see if anyone else had anything to say on the manner.

As the economies and political systems of many countries across the world are today being questioned, the past must be examined to understand what mistakes and triumphs have been made in the ever-expanding universe of fashion. Primarily, the question that echoes at the foot of the examination: What is fashion? Georg Simmel feeds insight to the query, presenting that “…fashion is a mechanism of self-modeling anticipatory socialization…

It is a social institution that channels and satisfies in a dynamic equilibrium two diametrically opposed motives—the wish to belong and, therefore, adapt to, a group and the ambition to rise above that group by presenting oneself as a daring and unique individual.” (Book review fashioneast). Truthfully vague, the statement cries existence of an ever-empowering element within the depths of fashion. Fashion is a tool. It is dependent upon the individual to decide whether to pursue it. Analysis in consideration, was there fashion under socialism? Socialism itself is a controversially complex methodology. Can there exist expression in restraint? Can it be that one lacks the very essence of expression in having freedom? “Official socialist dress was neither about fashion, nor about clothes. It was always simply a discourse with little bearing on reality” (Let them wear beige).

Djurdja Bartlett’s study on fashion under Communism, FashionEast, opens with a self-evident, though provocative, question: “Can fashion—a phenomenon deeply rooted in its own past and the past of Western civilization—start from zero?”

"Today, the fashion industry is so immersed in its own history and plays such a large role in the global market that it is difficult to imagine it without such frameworks. There was a time, however, in which this question was posed and investigated in earnest. The role of fashion within the socialist regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe is largely undocumented, and yet the sartorial developments that occurred during this period were of great consequence to the leaderships that valued fashion’s ability to produce desirable images and ideals, as well as its efficacy as a visual means to implement social change. Bartlett’s extensive research has yielded not only a thorough overview of fashion during this time but also a fascinating look at how these socialist governments attempted to harness and reinvent a system that was ideologically opposed to their own."

Bartlett’s study covers enormous ground, beginning in the Soviet Union and moving on to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia. The numerous images pulled from state-sponsored fashion magazines, socialist manuals on dress and etiquette, and advertisements convey a sense of the complex activity of the socialist fashion industry during the approximately 70 years covered in FashionEast. Her treatise begins with an outline of the Bolshevik understanding of dress, which formed an important part of their new society after the 1917 October Revolution. Fashion was no longer fashion: it was clothing. “Fashion” implied industry, hierarchy, and a means of establishing status that was tied to the past—specifically tsarist Russia’s past. In order to sever these associations, designs were no longer dictated by decorative, seasonal trends, and neither were they viewed as a carrier of status or change. Any aspect of clothing that distinguished one comrade too much from the next was not permitted, and for a short time even gendered garments were discouraged. Bartlett’s discussion of the Bolshevik attempt to dissociate clothing from its former meanings is significant in that it provides a very clear example of the tremendous symbolic power of fashion. The three phases of fashion under socialist rule that she outlines—post-revolutionary utopian dress, official state-directed socialist fashion, and Western-influenced everyday fashion—narrate the changing uses of this power, but it is this first one that solidifies our understanding of fashion as a symbol, and consequently, as an idea.

In conclusion, there is no problem with having the desire to look good, or have cloths that you like. The problem lies when you try to attain self-fulfillment or status through the acquisition of the clothes (or really any item, for that matter). If you de-commoditize them and focus more on their use-value, I don't believe there's a problem. There is nothing wrong with frivolities, but there is something wrong with what the companies do to market them and how they spend their profits. Shopping at thrift stores second hand shops are a way to compact this state of self-