Clothing Cultures - Volume 3, Issue 3, 2016

This article explores the ‘cultural biography’ of the caftan, a garment, which underwent significant changes as a part of Peter I’s urban clothing revolution. The article discusses the evolution of the caftan and changes in its functions and meanings, its historical, social and literary modes of circulation and the semiotic value it acquired in the eighteenth-century clothing system, and more broadly in eighteenth-century Russian culture. As a key garment of the Petrine dress reforms, the caftan became a material symbol of eighteenth-century modernizing processes and was often employed by writers to comment on social and cultural policies and practices. When the caftan (as part of a uniform) started to be associated with state control and the infringement on individual freedom, it was replaced by the dressing gown, which became a symbol of internal peace, freedom and creativity in literature and cultural life.

Russian rulers introduced numerous dress reforms in the imperial period, transforming the appearance of state institutions and thus the image of Russia and its elite. This article traces the origins and development of ‘Russian dress’, a stylized version of female Russian folk costume introduced to the Russian court by Catherine the Great (1762–1796) and worn, in various forms, from the 1770s to 1917. We examine the symbolic role ‘Russian dress’ played in shaping the image of the ruler, Russia’s relationship with the West, and shifting notions of Russianness at home and abroad.

Dress plays a key role within Pushkin’s historical novel, The Captain’s Daughter, and a number of studies have focussed on the significance of Peter Grinev’s gift of a hare-skin coat to the rebel Pugachev. This article departs from these previous studies by examining dress as a context-specific cultural sign, which forms a visual language understood by characters in the novel. Characters use cultural codes associated with traditional dress, including the tulup (a hare-skin coat), the dushegreika (a sleeveless, padded jacket) and the sarafan (a sleeveless pinafore dress), to gain assistance from unlikely sources. Such clothing identifies the wearer with traditional Russian values in opposition to the official code of conduct signified by uniforms and formal, westernized attire. The article aims to demonstrate the way in which ethnic dress reminds characters of their deeper kinship, which signals them to care for orphans, servants, the sick and others in need, even when those people belong to the enemy camp.

Scottish fabrics in Russian urban dress reflected a new artistic movement in Russia and around the world. Two portraits of Alexander Pushkin, both painted in 1827, provide an accurate representation of how ideas of Romanticism were embodied in fashion. In the portrait by Vasily Tropinin (1776–1857), the poet is depicted in a soft tie à la Byron, named in honour of the English Romantic poet, and in a capacious dressing gown. In Orest Kiprensky’s portrait, Pushkin appears in a capacious Almaviva cloak made of two-sided Scottish fabric, worn over a frock coat. The poet is depicted without a tailcoat. According to his friend Pavel Nashchokin, Pushkin did not have a tailcoat at this time and was trying to acquire a used one, which he could wear when he accompanied his wife to Court events. As is well known, Emperor Nicholas I advised the poet to write historical novellas in the spirit of Sir Walter Scott. Properly identifying discrete details of these costumes enables us to trace Pushkin’s predilections, as well as his attention to society’s literary interests at the time.

In early nineteenth-century Russia the categories of fashionable clothing and fashionable literature emerged side by side, which gave critics of the corresponding industries a convenient discourse for satirizing the latter in terms of the former. The writings and drawings this article examines show that the enmeshment of these two feminine economies endured for decades as a productive trope despite changes in the gendering of the garment industry around mid-century. Just as Roland Barthes asserted the legibility of fashion as a semiotic system, this study treats verbal and visual representations of clothing as legible texts that are open to interpretation. It also probes the problematic relationship among body, text and clothing in representations where the clothing is not worn on the body but rather becomes a body through the literary device of personification.

The ‘nihilist epoch’ in Russia of the 1860s was plagued by the mismatches between art and reality that could be discerned everywhere, from the philosophical maxims of the nihilists to their dress. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s notorious master’s thesis ‘The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality’ started that episteme, while his novel What Is to Be Done? provided codes of behaviour that were followed minutely by its fans. The article explores the gap between, on the one hand, the sartorial protests of real-life nihilists (fundamental to their construction of nihilist identity) and, on the other, the dress of the ‘new men’, modelled after the ideologues of the nihilist movement, such as Chernyshevsky. The analysis of the sartorial code of nihilism shows that it organically grew out of earlier European sartorial protest movements. In addition, I demonstrate how Chernyshevsky undermined his aesthetic theory by ‘not looking at life through blue spectacles’ as he tried to reflect reality and create the literary type of the ‘new man’, contributing to the later divergence between the sociocultural codes of ‘new men’ and ‘nihilists’.

This article examines the possible roots of the change in cultural attitudes, due to which fashionable objects of animal origin started to be viewed negatively in Russian fashion periodicals and advice manuals of the early twentieth century. Among these influences, we may count the development of the animal protection movement, with the Russian Society for the Protection of Animals established in 1865. Although initially this association was not concerned with fashion, it shaped the notion of the cruel treatment of animals, drawing public attention to this issue. An analysis of non-fiction writing by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Vikentii Veresaev will show that, while the Society’s agenda was ambiguous and met with a mixed response, the new sensibilities this group promoted were increasingly internalized by the educated public.

On the other hand, fashion criticism during the era argued that fashion distorts and deforms human shape by giving it animal features – that is, it assists degeneration. A reversal of evolution, in this case triggered by brutality, was similarly evoked by the proponents of animal protection. The newly perceived inappropriateness of certain fashionable objects was thus due to the double ‘animality’ they were believed to impart to the wearer: that of following the ‘fashion instinct’ and that of being complicit in violence.