Clothes as an indicator of the degree of freedom and the socioeconomic situation

In the contemporary society, the concept ‘freedom’ is more and more often considered as an important criterion for assessing the results of social transformations, for instance, for comparing the nowadays Russia and former Soviet Union. As a rule, researchers prefer the macro-level approach to such comparisons (economic, political science, social science, etc.), whereas the less global analytical perspective can be even more interesting - through the garments as an indicator of the degree of individual freedom in the context of the particular social system defining the framework of expressing such freedom in clothing. Undoubtedly, the contemporary society in general strongly supports the ambitions of an individual as a ‘creator’ of their own everyday life and in political, religious and other spheres by providing them with the necessary technologies and resources for self-development, promoting the idea of the plurality of the world as its regular state, and actual implementation of this idea in various spheres of nowadays life. By the case study of the Soviet society, the authors consider the ability of clothing to indicate a variety of features of the society, such as social-economic inequality, interaction with other social systems, adoption of cultural and behavioral patterns, changes in the ideological bases for constructing social identity, etc. The article does not claim to any global generalizations and is rather a case-illustration of the unfair sociological ignorance of the clothing’s functions in coding of important social practices, roles and transformations.