Commodifying Control
There’s something hauntingly meticulous about a regime that tries to control both the economy and the hemline. In authoritarian states, fashion is not left to artistry, rather it is nationalized. Structured. Watched. Reduced to utility. Yet within these constraints, style doesn’t disappear. It adapts. It resists.
In post-World War II Eastern Europe, fashion became an instrument of ideological performance. Communist regimes, especially in countries like Romania, the USSR, East Germany, and Yugoslavia, emphasized the erasure of class distinction. In practice, fashion was used to cultivate a new class entirely: the ideal socialist citizen.
The look was often utilitarian and unadorned. State-owned textile factories churned out a variety of monochromatic pieces, designed more for ideological correctness than individual expression. Luxury was equated with decadence, Westernness, and bourgeois excess. Style was stripped of ornament, just as political speech was stripped of dissent, unless your family was a part of the upper echelons of the communist party, or had access to private tailors.
By the 1970s and '80s, fashion publications like Burda, printed primarily in Czechoslovakia, became coveted contraband. Underground economies emerged around tailoring and textile swaps. Women repurposed curtains, dyed fabrics in bathtubs, and reverse-engineered patterns from smuggled catalogs.
Still, fashion wasn’t only a space of quiet rebellion, but one of performative allegiance. In North Korea, for example, state-sanctioned haircuts and lapel pins bearing the Supreme Leader’s face remain mandatory. In Ceaușescu’s Romania, clothing production was centralized under the Ministry of Light Industry. Scarcity was built into the system with rations on fabric, limitations on colors, and surveillance of excessive dress all served to remind citizens that beauty belonged to the state.
An image capturing a fashion show in the People's Republic
Post-1989, the collapse of these regimes left a cultural and aesthetic vacuum. The flood of Western fashion into post-Soviet spaces created both exhilaration and disorientation. Brands like Adidas and Levi’s gained iconic status, less for what they looked like, and more for symbolizing access, autonomy, and capitalism..
Decades later, designers have begun referencing post-Soviet aesthetics on runways. For example Demna, of Balenciaga and Vetements, and the so-called “Eastern Bloc minimalism” that circulates in fashion editorials. But here, too, lies a tension. What does it mean when authoritarian symbolism is repackaged as a trend? When the aesthetics of suppression are commodified, detached from their original context?
State-owned style is a reminder that clothing is never apolitical. The silhouette of control and the shape of resistance can look eerily similar. Even under regimes that tried to regulate color, fabric, femininity, and form, style still found a way to breathe.
Xoxo,
Annie
