ABSTRACT
This introduction provides an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims at understanding how clothing consumption has evolved in Russia during the last 20 years as massive changes covered a former socialist state, which has survived the so-called consumer revolutions. The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the shift to a market economy spurred an increased interest in consumption and postsocialism among scholars in the social sciences. Postsocialism is intended to explain the lives of historically generated and geographically bounded entities, in other words, of the former socialist states in Eastern and Central Europe and Russia in the 1990s and the early 2000s. Indeed, Russia has recently witnessed an upsurge of consumerism with the availability of an unprecedented variety of goods in every corner of the country. The ideology of excessive consumption seems to have infiltrated the public discourse of the whole nation, thanks to economic and political reforms.
