A few days ago I came across an outstanding artefact from the Soviet times. It was a well-preserved edition of a glossy magazine called Jurnal Modor, literally and rather plainly, Magazine of Fashion published in 1990, shortly before the breakdown of USSR.
Printing such a magazine was a tricky business in the epoch when you couldn’t find a single branded item in a state department store and even a pair of jeans was an ultimately unattainable dream for 99% of the country’s population.
Nevertheless, the whistle of change has been already blown and some of the most obstinate visionaries couldn’t help but launching a socialist response to Vogue. Despite scepticism and the sheer weirdness of the whole idea, it happened to be a solid and very well-done manuscript depicting all the hypes and trends that creators could steal from western magazines that they had to buy from smugglers.
Soviet pop-stars posing as models for the collection 'Summer 1990'
Jurnal mod obviously provoked a buzz among creative elite of that era and this is the reason why you can see all best pop stars of state television wearing Soviet-customized versions of Prada and Hugo Boss. It might sound like a joke, but they had to dress models in something produced solely in Russia so they tailored ‘Dior skirts’ in god-forsaken factories hundred kilometres away from Moscow to make up an authentic ‘Parisian’ look. And white, as they wisely predicted, is a major colour of the season again.