Projects
Fashioning Fashion in Socialist Bulgaria
The project will inquire into the paradoxical status of fashion under socialism, more specifically of fashion in clothing in socialist Bulgaria. Socialist authorities had a rather ambivalent relationship with fashion throughout the regime - on the one hand, fashion was ideologically incompatible with socialist ideals, it was considered a repugnant and unwanted remnant of the decadent, bourgeois, capitalist society; on the other hand, it was deliberately employed as an ideological tool in the shaping of the "new socialist man", inculcating socialist moral values and virtues. Fashion was subject to the pragmatic considerations governing the centrally planned economy of production and distribution and its deficiencies, at the same time it played an instrumental role in promoting socialist "consumer culture", especially from the 1960s onwards, and, unwittingly, in encouraging some black market practices. Fashion under socialism in Bulgaria, even if tied up to the Soviet fashion model, was struggling to emancipate itself from Western fashion by resorting to the invention of a specific national style in accordance with the formula "national in form, socialist in content", incorporating motifs borrowed from the "traditional" folk costume. All the same, popular imagination remained fascinated with Western fashion and commodities, as a result producing a variety of alternative fashion practices, some of which persecuted by the authorities.
The project will pursue a historical reconstruction of the changing dynamics of the "system of fashion" in the years of socialist rule in Bulgaria (1944-1989) by critically examining the various agencies shaping fashion and the complexity of institutional, ideological, economic, social, and cultural factors brought into play. The project will furthermore attempt to uncover how the system of official and unofficial (or alternative) fashion practices used to function in socialist Bulgaria. In this way, it will shed light not only on how the ideological guidelines were set and imposed from above, but also on how they were adopted and "domesticated" from below.