The Post-Soviet Fashion Aesthetic: Moving Past Postmodernism

The “post-Soviet aesthetic” disrupted the Western fashion industry when it first gained recognition in the early 2010s. It originated as an underground, indie fashion movement that took inspiration and symbols from the new post-Soviet youth culture, but soon was the the visual language of fashion’s most influential brands. The aesthetic's mainstream success in the fashion industry gave the Eastern European voice and experience unprecedented cultural power in the West, where it had once been overlooked, especially in post-Sovietism’s movement into and subsequent major influence on popular European luxury fashion. After the consolidation of its place in the high fashion sphere, its irreverent and referential style and Soviet origins disconcerted and divided fashion critics and consumers due to its apparent aesthetic and strategic opposition to the basic tenets of luxury fashion, an industry it would come to have significant and lasting impact on. In popular fashion discourse, the post-Soviet aesthetic has been classified as streetwear and an extension of postmodern fashion, a broad category that has dominated the last thirty years of high fashion. However, in this investigation, I utilize Raymond Williams’ theory of structures of feeling to delineate why the post-Soviet fashion aesthetic is distinguishable from the label of “postmodern fashion.” I provide a geo-historical and cultural context of the post-Soviet aesthetic and trace the movement's history and characteristics through the background and work of its three most significant founders and practitioners, Gosha Rubchinskiy, Demna Gvasalia and Lotta Volkova, each of whom had spent their childhood living in the Soviet Union, but experienced the collapse of the socialist state as adolescents and teenagers. I discuss the movement’s place in indie, high and, later, luxury fashion through the brands Vetements and Balenciaga. I then discuss the particular semiotic language and deconstructive practices of the aesthetic to identify the dominant, residual and emergent practices that engender its particular structure of feeling, distinguishing it from postmodern fashion.Bachelor of Art