Due East over Shadequarter Mountain, lithograph
Gustav Klutsis
Good Article: No Way In; An Angle on Contemporary Geometric Abstraction
http://fourninetyone.wordpress.com/2010/09/11/no-way-in-an-angle-on-recent-geometric-abstraction/
![Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothes, 1923
Walter Benjamin, preeminent theorist of mass culture and socialism, asked optimistically in his Arcades Project: “Does fashion die (as in Russia, for example) because it can no longer keep up the tempo?”[13] His question implies that only the tempo of actual social change brought about by revolution can obliterate the lure of fashion’s endless cycle of novelty. Yet an editorial in the first post-revolutionary issue of the women’s magazine Zhurnal dlia khoziaek (The Housewives’ Magazine) in 1922 declared in ringing tones: “our readers may think that fashion has died out … but our old friend fashion, powerfully ruling the female half of the human species, had no intention of dying!”[14] The many elegant Parisian dress patterns published in Soviet women’s magazines like The Housewives’ Magazine were directed at women buying fabric and then sewing at home or ordering dresses from small workshops. The mass production of clothing had been almost nonexistent in prerevolutionary Russia, and the idea of cheap, factory-produced stylish clothing that would be available to everyone was still largely utopian, given the primitive state of Soviet clothing production.
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0910/kiaer/en](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lvqj7dalzX1qh5qluo1_400.jpg)
Varvara Stepanova, Designs for sports clothes, 1923
Walter Benjamin, preeminent theorist of mass culture and socialism, asked optimistically in his Arcades Project: “Does fashion die (as in Russia, for example) because it can no longer keep up the tempo?”[13] His question implies that only the tempo of actual social change brought about by revolution can obliterate the lure of fashion’s endless cycle of novelty. Yet an editorial in the first post-revolutionary issue of the women’s magazine Zhurnal dlia khoziaek (The Housewives’ Magazine) in 1922 declared in ringing tones: “our readers may think that fashion has died out … but our old friend fashion, powerfully ruling the female half of the human species, had no intention of dying!”[14] The many elegant Parisian dress patterns published in Soviet women’s magazines like The Housewives’ Magazine were directed at women buying fabric and then sewing at home or ordering dresses from small workshops. The mass production of clothing had been almost nonexistent in prerevolutionary Russia, and the idea of cheap, factory-produced stylish clothing that would be available to everyone was still largely utopian, given the primitive state of Soviet clothing production.
