This book brings together sixteen essays by poet, writer, and fashion scholar Linor Goralik, originally published between 2007 and 2024, primarily in the Russian-language journal Teoriya mody: Odezhda, Telo, Kulʹtura. The volume reflects the continuity of Goralik’s interest in what she describes as “private individuals solving private problems related to clothing (and sometimes, more broadly, to social or cultural concerns) on a daily basis” (8). [Here and after, all translations from Russian are by the reviewer.]
Section 1 will be of particular interest to scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history. It focuses on practices of clothing consumption within the late USSR and among Soviet émigrés. The four essays included in this section—Closets of Memory: Recollections of 1990 Dress Practices; Shame and Pride: Clothing Alteration as a ‘Super-Soviet’ Practice in the ‘Displaced Nineties’; The Old Dress of the ‘Queen’: The Costume of a Girl Leader among Late Soviet Adolescents; and A Boy in the Button-Up Cardigan: Sartorial Expectations vs. Reality as Experienced by Late Soviet Emigres, 1988–1991—rely primarily on oral history. Analysis and detailed quotations are often interwoven within a single paragraph; while speakers are not always introduced, quotation marks clearly distinguish author’s and informants’ voices.
Goralik’s eye for telling detail makes these narratives vivid and striking. Based exclusively on personal testimonies, this set of essays complements existing scholarship on Soviet fashion and material culture often based on archival or printed sources. Reading these bodies of scholarship together reveals intriguing dynamics between Soviet creative producers and consumers. For example, while Soviet fashion designers published extensively on clothing for teenage girls, interviews collected by Goralik suggest that these debates largely bypassed consumers.
Throughout her work and as part of her method, Goralik focuses on what she sees as shared Soviet experiences—shortages, informal economies, the collapse of familiar supply chains, and a familiar social order—rather than on how similar problems were experienced differently across the culturally and ethnically diverse USSR. Sections 2 and 3 address a broader range of topics in fashion history, though several essays engage with Soviet and post-Soviet materials or with personal testimonies from Russian-speaking informants. Although clothing—its acquisition, modification, and representation in media—remains the central object of analysis, with occasional forays into food and alcohol advertising, the book will interest not only fashion scholars but also scholars working on memory, identity, migration, and post-Soviet transformation.
The opening essay, Closets of Memory (2011), begins with the author’s autobiographical account of departure from the USSR to Israel in 1989. This and several other essays, among other things, address the late Soviet emigration (1988–91), examining how departure and painful integration into a new life were negotiated through everyday practices of dress. This theme resonates strongly today amid new displacement across Eurasia caused by the war in Ukraine, political repression, and the anti-migrant crackdown in post-2022 Russia.
Another central topic is contested memories of Perestroika and the 1990s in post-Soviet spaces. Goralik introduces a concept of “displaced 1990s” (smeshchennye devianostye) to capture how informants recall this period spanning the mid-1980s to early 1990s. The essay Closets of Memory offers especially valuable insights into how this transitional period is remembered and narrativized through the seemingly mundane lens of everyday dress, making it a strong addition to university syllabi on the Soviet collapse and its aftermath.
Closely related is the topic of alleged nostalgia for the Soviet past, often attributed to post-Soviet Russian culture. Goralik examines when nostalgia arises and what underlies it. The selective mobilization of images of the Soviet past is explored through case studies such as an advertising campaign for Rosagroexport cottage cheese bars, whose brand name imitates Soviet anti-capitalist abbreviations, while the slogan echoes Vladimir Maiakovskii’s early Soviet advertising poetry. Goralik argues that “Soviet retro”—simplified and non-problematic images of the Soviet past—became widespread since the 2000s in response to unspoken psychological demands, particularly among the generation of “last Soviet children,” born in the 1970s. While their post-Soviet lives diverged sharply along social and economic line, they felt the need for a shared symbolic language, and, as she argues, “the symbols of Soviet childhood, is the only common language that they still share” (310). They also needed a coherent and largely positive narrative of the past to respond to the unresolvable paradox: “… the majority of the country’s population lived in the Empire of Evil and is now forced to somehow reconcile their personal past, which cannot be abandoned, with the country’s past, the rejection of which seems necessary” (313).
The essay Anna, Lara, and ‘Katyusha’: Mythologemes of ‘Russianness’ in Contemporary Fashion Design is another example of a non–oral-history-based essay addressing Soviet and Russian identity construction. Goralik shows how western designers such as German-born Karl Lagerfeld, who worked for the French brand Chanel, draw simultaneously on images of imperial aristocracy, romanticized peasantry, revolutionary Bolsheviks, and Cold War-era military power. It later circulated back into post-Soviet Russian fashion, while alternative interpretations developed in the USSR or post-Soviet Russia largely failed to reach western fashion capitals.
Overall, this collection is an excellent resource for scholars of Soviet and post-Soviet history. Selected essays, particularly those on the 1990s, would work well in university courses for students proficient in Russian. One can only hope that some of these essays will eventually be translated into English to reach a wider scholarly audience.
