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This book is devoted to the Old Rus' dress of the Upper Volga area, as gleaned from the archaeological evidence of the burial sites.The organic remains of dress and metal and glass ornaments and fasteners are considered. Issues such as the social status and age of the buried individuals, as well as the influence of various ethnic groups (including East Slavic groups, Finno-Ugric tribes and the Balts ) on the dress of the Old Rus', are addressed through the study of variants of male and female headdresses, clothes and accessories. Furthermore, a detailed study of the evolution of the headdress and the structure of jewelry from the late 10th century to the 13th century is offered.

The idea of fashion under socialism conjures up images of babushka headscarves and black market blue jeans. And yet, as Djurdja Bartlett shows in this groundbreaking book, the socialist East had an intimate relationship with fashion. Official antagonism--which cast fashion as frivolous and anti-revolutionary--eventually gave way to grudging acceptance and creeping consumerism. Bartlett outlines three phases in socialist fashion, and illustrates them with abundant images from magazines of the period: postrevolutionary utopian dress, official state-sanctioned socialist fashion, and samizdat-style everyday fashion. Utopian dress, ranging from the geometric abstraction of the constructivists under Bolshevism in the Soviet Union to the no-frills desexualized uniform of a factory worker in Czechoslovakia, reflected the revolutionary urge for a clean break with the past. The highly centralized socialist fashion system, part of Stalinist industrialization, offered official prototypes of high fashion that were never available in stores--mythical images of smart and luxurious dresses that symbolized the economic progress that socialist regimes dreamed of. Everyday fashion, starting in the 1950s, was an unofficial, do-it-yourself enterprise: Western fashions obtained through semiclandestine channels or sewn at home. The state tolerated the demand for Western fashion, promising the burgeoning middle class consumer goods in exchange for political loyalty. Bartlett traces the progress of socialist fashion in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and Yugoslavia, drawing on state-sponsored socialist women's magazines, etiquette books, socialist manuals on dress, private archives, and her own interviews with designers, fashion editors, and other key figures. Fashion, she suggests, with all its ephemerality and dynamism, was in perpetual conflict with the socialist regimes' fear of change and need for control. It was, to echo the famous first sentence from the Communist Manifesto, the spectre that haunted socialism until the end.

This article makes a series of interlocking arguments regarding the way in which gender and dress contributed to the meaning of the terrorist act in revolutionary Russia. It argues that because “populist political terrorism” entailed political assassination targeting specific individuals, the individual attributes of both terrorist and victim acquired symbolic significance. The terrorist act was troped as a duel that staged a contest of superior and legitimate violence - and thus of sovereignty - between the regime and its opponents (representing “the will of the people”). Women were prominent participants in terrorist acts throughout the revolutionary period, and the relative novelty of female political violence enhanced the spectacularity of that violence. Female terrorists, however, opted for an anti-spectacular spectacularity, or renunciatory display, that was rendered by a means available to all women: through their dress. While period memoirs and literature, as well as the historiography, are equally enthralled by the self-renunciation of revolutionary women and characterize it as a moral/ideological stance, the female terrorists’ “great renunciation” in fact became the dominant trope in the (self) representation of the female Russian revolutionary terrorist. Textual reencodings of the relationship between dress and female gender in discourses of different orders, including the self-writing of female terrorists, find in “the great renunciation” the womens’ right to act politically - “to kill and die” in public - as well as the moral legitimacy of their act.

This article studies the main functions of textile and sartorial artifacts in a three-volume edition of Russian folktales collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev. The author explores the revealing, concealing, transformational, aesthetic, utilitarian, and metaphorical roles of attire. Special attention is given to historical, social, and gender-related issues in pre-Petrine and post-Petrine Russian culture that may have had an impact on the representations of dress and sartorial motifs in the tales. Occasional references to similar motifs and images in Western folklore are provided.

Norton reviews The Empire's New Clothes: A History of the Russian Fashion Industry, 1700-1917 by Christine Ruane.