This Translation Tuesday, enter the circles that defined Soviet-era fashion with Estonian novelist and ex-journalist Maimu Berg, whose novel House of Fashion fictionalises the strange sartorial world that she herself had inhabited when she worked for the Tallinn-based fashion magazine Siluett. In these extracts, we follow the wide-eyed Betti as she cavorts with a cast of fashion designers, post-censors from the Ministry of Culture, models and photographers, all this time wryly defending her role as a writer in this grand, far-flung industry. With D. E. Hurford’s translation, the energy of a lesser-known aspect in Soviet history is unveiled to English readers who are sure to be baffled by some of these playful anecdotes and the inside scoop.
Soviet Fashion.
To Moscow, to Moscow.
Drug-addict models.
Everyone who lived in the Soviet Union nurtured a pious dream of visiting Moscow. At least that was what most Muscovites thought. When an invitation was sent from Moscow to the houses of fashion in, say, Tashkent or Alma-Ata, to come and see the latest developments in Soviet fashion, scuffles would break out. Anyone with even the smallest bit of status felt that she should be the one to go to Moscow, the navel of the world, where smoked sausage, tinned crab, Polish scent, East German hair products, mother-of-pearl lipstick, and a preposterous selection of handbags, jumpers and winter boots could be bought. She should be the one who, after a dull and tedious meeting at the Soviet Union’s head house of fashion, should get to trudge through crowded tunnels full of pongy dour people and go “from GUM to TsUM” (the two big Moscow department stores of the time) and to fabled shops like Vanda, Vlasta and Leipzig, where the peoples’ republics sold their own products, mainly cosmetics. No shopper really thought about the actual meaning of “people’s republic”; any Soviet woman who was the least clued-up associated the phrase with those particular stores near the centre of Moscow. In the morning before these wondrous shops opened, there would be a queue of women patiently snaking its way in front of the doors. Technically the queuing had started back in their home cities—the provincial houses of fashion had waiting lists for those wanting a trip to Moscow and there could be a wait of up to three or four years before it was your turn.
A similar sort of passion also inflamed the Tallinn House of Fashion in a minor way, but inversely. Usually, at the coldest point of the year, no one had any desire to trundle off in the train to Moscow, go to considerable trouble to stay at a hotel (you might well have made a reservation, but that didn’t guarantee you anything), visit all the shops needed to work through the order list given to you by friends and colleagues, cover huge distances by metro and trolleybus, and doze off in lectures presenting the clothing models redesigned by Moscow fashion designers and stylised to fit Soviet fashion, accompanied by some silly nonsense about the latest trends in Soviet fashion. These trends tended to be the same as the trends available in the West a year before, just that the designs had been made more boring and less sexy. Visiting Moscow was nice when it was warm and when fashion shows were on the agenda, whether those of the Moscow house of fashion or, even better, smaller fashion shows by different embassies, or by some Western firm that had gone to the trouble and expense of coming to the bleak plains of Sarmatia in the hope of sooner or later striking it lucky and the vast, gaping emptiness of the Russian market opening up just for them.
The first time Betti ended up in Moscow as a staff member at the Tallinn House of Fashion she travelled with head designer Milla Säga, a striking lady, tall, alert and strong, with a completely un-Estonian nose and stylishly dressed, as befitted her profession, and on that occasion dressed particularly strikingly. They headed for Hotel Berlin, whose heyday was long past—the last time there had been carp swimming in the marble basin of its fountain, for guests to select one and get most of it at a formal dinner in the ostentatiously handsome hotel restaurant, had probably been during Lenin’s New Economic Policy of the 1920s. By now, however, the carp had long been eaten and the basin drained; now the hotel lobby stank of people and grain coffee over-sweetened with condensed milk—breakfast was being served. There was no hope of getting a room so early, but even more tragically, it seemed no reservation for the Tallinn House of Fashion could be found, even though the receptionist flicked back and forth through the worn bookings diary and even rang somewhere to ask.
Milla Säga, this sparkling lady who spoke Russian with an Estonian accent that sounded sweet in Betti’s ears and who was generally quite loud anyway, sharpened the tone by pointing to the dried-up fountain and informing all who wished to hear that it was “definitely here that she’d booked”. By an unfortunate error of Russian verb conjugation, however, she managed to inform everyone that it was definitely here she’d peed. The receptionist heroically stifled the laugh that emerged as her mind formed an image of the tall, elegant and self-confident Milla Säga tinkling the marble of the hotel fountain. However, she did understand what Säga meant to say, which was that she had personally sent the hotel a letter asking to book rooms for us. On this occasion, a Baltic accent was useful; without it the phone call probably wouldn’t have been made, and after a lot of faffing around and handing out copies of Siluett magazine (and some 25-rouble notes “getting lost” between their pages) Milla and Betti finally got the longed-for keys and clattered up in the lift to their floor.
The rooms looked onto the hotel courtyard. Of course. However often Betti stayed at hotels, she always “just happened” to get a dingy room looking onto a gloomy courtyard. She had even started to suspect that with hotels, the side of the building facing the street with largish windows wasn’t actually genuine, but just a façade with no real rooms behind it.
The group of experts was gathered around the table of the hall of the Moscow House of Fashion. Less important persons, Betti among them, sat at some distance from the round table, while copies of the most recent directions of Soviet fashion were passed around the room. By the time the black-and-white working drawings of the model garments had reached Betti, the most important people around the round table had already expressed their approval (no one else would question them). The drawings were bland, dry and boring and not intended as an artistic experience, only to show what the great Soviet Union was promised in fashion for the next year. So-called normal length hemlines—even though young Russian women had long sworn by the mini skirt —modest necklines—this command, too, very often disregarded in real life—small collars, girlish gloves, slimming vertical seams, all terribly proper and drearily colourless, bland and sometimes tasteless, repeated from one year to the next. Even so, the notes made every year at this annual orientation in Moscow were always the subject of much discussion.
The post-censor of fashion publications, if she can be so called, was an official at the Ministry of Culture by the name of Ottilia Franzevna—not a Slavic-sounding name, as she was originally from Latvia. Ottilia had to be sent the latest issue of Siluett, even if it had already been printed and received by its readers, and she would still add remarks and recommendations so that old mistakes were not repeated in subsequent issues. She was in the habit of using a thick red pen, and the Siluetts she’d looked through always returned from Moscow looking like tests by a bad student marked and returned by the teacher. The magazine would be covered in remarks in red pen, with every décolletage and slit marked with big red question marks and exclamation marks, and parts of the text underlined in thick pen. Over-revealing necklines and bold slits would tempt any men who happened to be examining the magazine to stray from the straight and narrow, the models were “bleary-eyed drug addicts,” the text was ideologically thoroughly bad quality— lots of marks deducted for Betti—and the whole magazine would never have been published had it only reached Ottilia Franzeva’s red pen in time.
Ottilia would pour particularly heavy scorn on the Latvian and Estonian fashion magazines, Rigas Modes and Siluett, so that no one could accuse her of being parochial. Indeed, they were the most sinful of the fashion magazines.
Good heavens, those Estonians had included pictures of some so-called “fashion jewellery”. How dreadful! The jeweller, some Rein Mets or other, had made it from teeny-weeny porcelain hands and feet and a life-size glass eye. Siluett’s designers had instructed the makeup artist to give the model a completely white face, dressed the girl completely in black “like a nun!” cried Ottilia Franzevna’s pen—and placed the glass eye jewellery on top of her eye. The result was an indecent eyesore, like something straight out of a horror film, which was something that Ottilia Franzevna had accidentally happened to watch while abroad (they had wanted to go and secretly watch porn, but—just as horrendously—had somehow ended up at a horror film).
On this occasion the diligent fashion censor wasn’t satisfied with mere red punctuation marks. The offence had to be notified to the Minister of Culture of the country concerned and from there to the knowledge of the Central Committee. Ottilia Franzevna had already got started on this when Milla Säga, suspecting trouble, asked her for an audience and came to do penance on behalf of herself, the House of Fashion and the editorial board of Siluett, while still maintaining her self-confidence and intransigence. Milla was a head and a half taller than the hefty Latvian, her thick dark hair was styled and fashionably cut, her trouser suit was dazzlingly elegant and an original Rein Mets piece of jewellery hung round her neck, so sophisticated and beautiful that Ottilia Franzevna’s eyes were forcibly drawn to it. A strange uncertainty overwhelmed the woman fighting in the front lines for the purity of Soviet fashion. It would have taken her an immense effort to achieve Milla’s levels of self-confidence, elegance and arrogance, even though such qualities were deemed suspect by the moral code of the builders of Communism. Suddenly Ottilia Franzevna began to sense that these qualities were the future and just what the world wanted—the world whose purity and wholesomeness she had been so heroically fighting to defend. A suspicion awoke in her that most of the experts who sat around the round table, their hair done up in buns, dreamed deep-down of looking like the head designer of the Tallinn House of Fashion.
Milla Säga told Ottilia Franzevna confidentially that a senior Communist in Estonia actually had a glass eye, and if the photograph showing the Rein Mets jewellery that had offended Ottilia were to reach the local committee stamped by Moscow it would cause a crisis. Ottilia Franzevna enjoyed this tall, imposing and proud woman having to ask her for something, the idea of the fate of the swanky Tallinn House of Fashion and uppity editorial board of Siluett being dependent on her, Ottilia Franzevna. (It didn’t depend on her at all, in fact, but Milla Säga was cunning and knew how to present things the right way.) For just a moment, Ottilia pretended to be an angry lady demanding a stern punishment for the wrong-doer, but then, out of her own magnanimity and the opportunity to humiliate Milla, she relented and gave in.
“Let this be the last time I need to warn you about this” she said, banging her fist on the table in time with her words in the hope of drawing Milla’s attention to her rings. But Milla looked over Franzevna’s head into the distance, her face fixed in an inscrutable expression.
“Remember that these kinds of frivolities” (Ottilia pronounced the last word, recently picked up at a meeting, with satisfaction) “are to disappear from the pages of your magazine. And check carefully whom you employ as a model. We don’t want to see any more drug addicts or nuns.”
Ottilia Franzevna stood up behind the table. She barely reached up to Milla Sägä’s shoulders, which gave her an inferiority complex—for no reason, as Säga was just unfeasibly tall for a woman and if anyone should have had a complex, it was Milla. Ottilia Franzevna held out her hand to the head designer and dangled it before Milla’s nose for some time—behold at last how precious and rare these rings are!—an emerald, a ruby framed with genuine diamonds, and a huge moonstone—and the audience was over.
Fashion designers and fashion faux pas.
The fashion designers shared a large room on the second floor where they each sat at a desk, flicking through foreign magazines and sketching the new trends as notes to themselves. There was nothing wrong in this—in fact, almost all of them had boundless imagination, which they quite successfully deployed for the twice-yearly fashion shows. However, they couldn’t ignore what was in fashion in the West—whether dictated by the whims of some designer or the needs of the market or the sewing industry. An ordinary person wouldn’t have managed to sift through those esteemed fashion magazines; it needed the training, skill and eye of the designer. The cut, the silhouette, the shoulder line, the length of a coat, the shape of a collar, raglan, kimono or even set-in sleeves—all of this was obscured by the treacherously varied and often impossible ways in which the clothes were shown. Most of the pictures were just pretty photos—looking at them, you couldn’t tell how the clothes had been sewn and how they should be fitted. The untrained eye focused more on the models and how beautiful or ugly they were, how slim they were, their makeup, hairstyles, necks, hands, the length and trimness of their legs, eye colours and facial expressions; while the girls might be heavily made-up, they were still something understandable and real.
The designers, though, read from the fashion pictures what to sketch into the trends of the next season and plot a safe course towards the right new fashion, even behind the Iron Curtain. Even so, tales were still told in the West of the clothes that were in fashion with Soviet women for several years: horrible underwear, fragrances that smelled of cheap soap, hopelessly ugly, clunky shoes, toilet rolls in string bags and other unfortunate accessories. Estonian women might have been slightly more Western, but the meagre offering in the fabric shops, the miserable uniformity of ready-to-wear and odd fashion trends—for example the mania for crimplene, white berets or the spread of air force pilot caps, the obligatory nylon jackets—which from time to time, like an epidemic, seized the masses who knew nothing of fashion, could still overwhelm Estonian women, who in other respects were much calmer, more style-minded and more moderate in their tastes than the average Soviet woman.
For a time Siluett tried to intervene against lapses of taste: the photographer strode along the streets of Tallinn together with the designer or editor, and in summer they even went to the beaches. The designer would point at some sartorial lapse and the photographer would aim the lens of their enormous camera at the poor offender. The only ‘mercy’ granted was that when the photo appeared in the magazine, the subject’s eyes were blacked out with a thick line so that people who didn’t know them wouldn’t recognise them. On a couple of occasions, Betti found herself in company where these ‘offender’ pages were read and commented on with great gusto. Most ridiculed were the fat women who had refused to bow to good taste and cover themselves in nondescript, vertically striped sack dresses and who allowed their ample busts and hefty rolls of fat to show through close-fitting jumpers, revealing generous thighs under their horrendously short skirts and pasty knee-backs. “Look at that fatty!” shrieked many a lady only slightly thinner, jabbing her chubby finger at the stomach of a full-figured, unsuspecting woman who’d been secretly photo’d at the beach. “Absolutely dreadful, no sense of style at all. Has she no shame?”
It always annoyed Betti when people laughed at those photos in the magazine. In her opinion, the women who’d ended up in front of the camera and labelled as criminally tasteless (for some reason men never seemed to be among the offenders, and where were they all anyway?) weren’t actually all that terrible. There were plenty like them everywhere, you could have picked out almost anyone in the country and held them up for ridicule. On the contrary, Betti was impressed by the boldness with which the plump dressed in fashionable clothes and allowed their flaws to show. Nearly everyone, even people who conceal their physical shortcomings, should at some point try taking off their sack dresses and stretchy suspender belt—worn on the hips like a corset, making the backside look as if it consisted of a single strap—and let the rolls of fat free, and generally in front of the man whose eye you most wanted to please. Wouldn’t it have been much more honest to reveal your true shape straight away so that there would be nothing to complain about and no unpleasant surprises later? In those days, though, if something wasn’t perfect (and that was an awful lot of things), you had to ignore it, cover it over and hide it or at least be ashamed of it, and improve it, smooth it over, dress it up and gloss it over.
The hunt for ugliness was just a side issue though. The designers sat at their workplace all day, as was the custom then—sometimes they slyly extended their lunch break—and looked through magazines, sketched fashions and earned very modestly for the standards of the time.
The House of Fashion was (and probably would still be today) one of those rare places where someone creative could enjoy working in their favourite field, get paid for it, have the opportunity to apply their ideas in the form of a range of clothes and be recognised for their work. Betti tried to imagine poets doing something similar: spending day after day browsing through the world’s most important poetry collections and other literary works, pondering for a moment, hand on cheek and staring into the distance, allowing inspiration to flow and the muse to arrive and then writing poetry of their own, with the greatest feeling and sweeping sensitivity, full of strange influences which could only be sensed and which, they could be sure, would soon be in print as a dainty collection. Back then, when the journey from manuscript to published book could sometimes take years and involved all kinds of complications, writers only rarely enjoyed that kind of luxury, and even then only once they were established writers. Then again, poets weren’t likely to be able to wring just anything out of themselves. Just as poets, unlike designers, wouldn’t be suited to working packed in a room together with other poets exposed to the disruptive influence of international literature.
Betty did well to keep these comparisons to herself. No one was expecting any opinions from her on questions of fashion or taste, although her job at Siluett was to put words to what the designers produced—in Russian culture, the effect, power and role of words had long been held more important than performance art or music, a tradition that had been readily taken on by the Soviet Union. If Betti nonetheless sometimes incautiously opened her mouth and said something about what this or that designer had produced or about fashion in general, Silvi, Siluett’s sharp-tongued designer, would put her in her place by saying that humanities graduates shouldn’t involve themselves in art. They lacked the training, and hence a concept of things; the opinions of an amateur mean little, no one needs them or expects them.
In the end Betti had enough of Silvi’s superiority. “You poor things are married to the House of Fashion—if you lost your jobs here, you’d have to go and work at some fashion atelier where you’d have to put up with completely ignorant requests from fickle customers, whereas I could use my degree to get a job anywhere. I can write any old twaddle and the main thing is that it’s grammatically correct. You though, you’re fashion designers! It pains me to think that all you’d be good for are the textile factories, here at the House of Fashion or in some atelier, hunched in a cubicle. There aren’t many options, so you have to cling onto this place for dear life. You’ve got no reason to be proud. And what’s more—”Betti ranted on enthusiastically—“what’s more, I as a humanities graduate represent the opinion of the ordinary citizen, and it would be incomprehensible if you didn’t take it into account.”
Betti was now sure that Silvi would be incensed, and some of the other designers were quite frosty towards her from then on, but things turned out differently. Silvi listened to Betti’s childish tirade, smiling with the benefit of her life experience. God had blessed Silvi with a generous dose of humour and a suitably ironic, brilliant mind. Sometime later, looking at Silvi’s small slender body and gleaming crown of beautifully thick hair, Betti thought that Silvi was balanced in every way. The thick hair was an extension of the wise thoughts, her fierceness—the rapidity of her movements—was what kept her slender. People are always advised to exercise if they want to lose weight. You don’t necessarily need to run around a gym though, exercising your brain hard enough would do instead, Betti was sure of that. Silvi wasn’t especially sporty either.
There were many fantastic people among the designers. The concentration of skill and spirit was a wonder in itself, intensified into one single room, yet still fitting into it. Most of the designers were women of course (apart from Mel, Betti couldn’t remember a single male designer. Orp Paganino didn’t start at the House of Fashion until later), who had to dash to the shops to get their family something to eat, stand queuing for oranges or grapes, think what to wear every morning, and every evening think what to cook tomorrow and where to get the ingredients. They had to sew, knit, clean, cook, wash up, do laundry, keep a steady hand steering the ship of marriage, which was forever in danger of sailing into a rock, had to try to live so that they didn’t become the subject of gossip yet could also talk behind someone’s back when necessary—essentially, too follow the old wisdom that said “make sure the wolves are fed but the sheep are saved”.
There were also designers who didn’t have families, of course. Or who were married but had no children. They were free, well-off and happy, often beautiful too, slender and individual. They fluttered on the grey stone steps of the House of Fashion like radiant spirits and looking at them, no one could think of anything humanly biological such as menstruation, sweat, dandruff or bad breath. They were created to sweeten the world and only the models could compete with them. And not even the models really; models might be enveloped in beauty, but they lacked the mystique of creativity.
A trained eye could spot a designer in a crowd immediately. As a rule, they had straight hair, usually ending just below their ears, and they often had a fringe, sometimes quite short hair or else freely wafting curls. They wore black, emphatically timeless clothing, marked by a certain element of surprise, wit and artful artlessness—and hence were always in fashion.
Translated from the Estonian by D. E. Hurford
Maimu Berg (b. 1945) is an Estonian novelist, poet, dramatist, translator and critic, and was a member of the Estonian Parliament. In the 1970s and 1980s she worked as a journalist at the Estonian fashion magazine Siluett, which occupied the rare position of being published in both Estonian and Russian, reaching readers throughout the Soviet Union. Moemaja (House of Fashion) is a somewhat fictionalised memoir of those times. Through anecdotes about colleagues, friendship visits to magazines in Riga, Kyiv and East Berlin and interactions with the central authorities in Moscow, it gives an inside view into the Soviet fashion industry.
D. E. Hurford is a translator from Estonian, Finnish, German and Swedish. She grew up in the UK and completed a master’s degree in comparative literature at Åbo Akademi University in Finland before moving to Belgium, where she currently works as a translator.
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