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Djurdja Bartlett, FashionEast: New Spectre One to Haunted Socialism, MIT Push, Cambridge MA, 2011. 300pp., ? hb., 978 0 26202 650 5.

Owen Hatherley

One of the more interesting current Russian blockbusters, Valeriy Todorovskys 2008 Stilyagi, try a sounds set in 1950s’ Moscow. New historical Stilyagi was in fact the fresh new Soviet Union’s beatniks, enthusiasts having progressive jazz and you may rock and roll, who wearing approximations out of Western fashion, simulating quiffs and you may zoot suits as much as adaptation and you can improvisation you’ll enable it to be. About motion picture, they are constantly harassed by the Komsomol, the fresh new Communist Young people Group, who are wear the same, rough-hewn boiler suits, and you will which fill in these to (sometimes alternatively fetishistic) beatings and personal humiliations. Regarding film’s valedictory ending, the latest Stilyagi march along the Tverskaya, Moscow’s main commercial street, and you can suddenly the new 1950s’ hipsters take a trip forwards with time, taking walks with the goths, metalheads and freaks of your own capitalist area. The message try unsubtle. But rather than simply presenting all of them given that forefathers of modern subcultures, right here new Stilyagi are available so much more while the Moscow’s first The Russians: vibrant, charismatic, nonconformist, sex-obsessed and you can sexualized within their skirt, the first to expose a composition who would come to take over this very aggressively capitalist of modern places. Continua a leggere