Soviet fashion design at micro level: bricolage, scarcity, creativity

The phenomenon of Soviet fashion is widely acknowledged, but it is still little known about Soviet designers' professional routines and the way they solved their professional tasks in a planned economy. The existing studies explored Soviet fashion as part of the planned economy and everyday culture. The study aims at explaining how Soviet designers overcame the limits of the planned economy and made performative statements. Soviet fashion design is analyzed in terms of bricolage. Evidence comes from archival documents and 14 in-depth interviews with ex-employees of the Perm Clothing Design House and Experimental Workshop of Everyday Service Department. As a result, the author describes the features and peculiarities of individual bricolage in Soviet fashion design, resources enriching bricoleurs' repertoire, and practices of dialogues of the bricoleurs with resources and technologies. Designers did not limit themselves to reproducing official principles of Soviet fashion, but using the bricolage opportunities, they endeavored to make the inner sense shift. Their performative statements did not transform the public fashion discourse, but they affected the professional discourse of a concrete organization or co-workers. In the context of Soviet subjectivity studies, our findings extend the vision of Soviet subject's creativity under conditions of scarcity and government control.