In the period of the feminist movements, the phraseology turned around the concept that “the personal is political”. One could adopt a similar concept to describe the importance - and the different, even subliminal aspects – of fashion under communism. The experience of Poland shows some of the most interesting consequences of that assumption. “Fashion is politics” – affirm today sociologists, historians and professionals when reconsidering the socialist period in that country. That sentence can describe the attitude both of the political power and the persons that refused, even just with their attitude towards fashion, to be homogenised, encapsulated into the social image of the regime. The political power – the party in this case – had an obsession about how people were dressed. The class struggle passed also through the appearance. The “official” style was imposed by the authorities: the labour image “translated” into a grey state-approved fashion, a sort of sad ideological purity.
The first to react to this conformism were the intellectuals, while other parts of the Polish society preferred a different reaction: freedom was to get drunk. For the intellectuals and for the women, that started to have their intimate reaction, fashion was to wear just something different, something that the others did not have. The changes became more relevant from the 1960s, a period characterised in Poland as well in many other socialist countries in Central-Eastern Europe by the “import” of alternative, disrespectful cultural models stressing even more the importance of fashion as a protest. Elegance was considered bourgeois in Western Europe, as the beatnik generation suggested. The same occurred in Poland and in the other countries beyond the curtain. Of course, at these latitudes “bourgeois” was simply the political power as bourgeoisie officially did not exist.
However, in the same period some other elements emerged. Thanks to informal contacts, fashion and women magazines (the most famous is probably the German monthly Burda) started to circulate. On the other hand, in the socialist system graphics developed in a much unexpected way, contributing to create the basis for a real alternative Polish fashion. The most important contribution came from a very famous magazine, “Przekrój” (literally cross-section), a perfect mixture of intellectual challenges where some of the most famous writers, poets, artists and cartoonists, such as Wisława Szymborska, Stanisław Lem and Czesław Miłosz, published their first important works. In the magazine, also photographs could share their professional experiences.
While Poland was interested by the anti-Semitic and anti-intellectual campaign the government launched in 1968, the society reacted by wearing hats and keeping the hair long. It was another way to show the diversity and the disagreement with that campaign. As in the Western countries, Hippies appeared also in the most important Polish towns, while the reaction of the Milicja (the terrible and violent national police) was just a confirmation that any deviation, even a small one, from “normality” was seen as subversive.
This is also the moment when Barbara Hoff – a woman that can be considered the real first creator in the Polish fashion – started her extraordinary activity. Born in 1932, her first very coloured collection was presented in the largest Warsaw department store in a special area named for the occasion “Hoffland”. The impressive, massive success of the event pushed the manager to avoid its repetition. Years later, using a lot of understatement, Barbara Hoff confessed that in a country where raw materials were so poor and limited fashion was the very unbalanced sum of design (1%) and organization (the remaining 99%). However, to some extent, it was already too late. From the 1970s, the streets in the largest Polish towns were a sort of social, mass stage where young generations were showing their conception of freedom and protest. The punk movement erupted also in Poland, adding new aspects to the urban subcultures that were not comfortable with the social, political, and cultural environment.
When one observes the images of those years, it appears almost inevitable to affirm that the system could not resist forever. It was just a question of time. If the economy was suggesting that the state-controlled system was irrational and, in the end, a waste of raw materials, energies, and talents, the society and particularly the young generations were already looking ahead: towards another world, another system, another society.
In the new post-communist Poland there is room for a reconsideration of the old times even from the fashion’s perspective. Ania Kuczyńska probably represents the best example of how today’s Polish fashion is able to re-elaborate the style of the past in a sort of new contemporary “socialist style” unifying Polish inspired design with the most dynamic trends circulating among the fashion’s creatives in Eastern European countries.
Currently the works of Barbara Hoff can be witnessed at the Gdynia City Museum. The images below give an impression of the exhibition, which was a source of inspiration for this article.
