ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the discourse on fashion and clothing consumption has changed in Russia since the beginning of the 1990s in the context of postsocialist transformations. Beginning in the mid-1990s, a number of magazines concerned with issues of fashion and clothing consumption entered the media market in Russia. Former socialist women's magazines, such as Rabotnitsa and Krestianka, were forced to reorient in the new circumstances and find new audiences. Every single issue of Krestianka in that decade included sewing patterns and knitting schemes. Even though sewing and knitting were necessitated by the hard times, fashion, femininity, and taste played important roles in the discourse of handmade items. Gradually, the magazine began to negotiate the current consumer culture with new practices and discuss the experience of Russian consumers. In the first half of the 1990s, the ideology of repair dominated the magazine's pages. The magazine promoted the making and remaking of clothes, sewing, and embroidering.