Soviet Women and Fur Consumption in the Brezhnev Era

Tikhomirova, Anna

doi:10.2307/j.ctv43vtgm.15

Cited by 4 publications

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“…And the material is very delicate, so I wash it by hand. And I really like this blouse so I wear it rarely.At first sight counterintuitive, Jadwiga's reasoning that she wears the blouse ‘rarely’ because ‘she really likes it’ illustrates how paying heed to older clothes' fragility perpetuated a distinction between ‘“going‐out clothes” and “everyday clothes”’ (Tikhomirova : 301), singling out ‘special clothing’ (Miller & Parrott ). Further, when considering Jadwiga's words, one gets the sense that the attribution of the flowers to the hands of a female ancestor is of greater import than their definitive ascription to a specific woman, echoing the prioritization in clothing inheritance of lines of families over individual kin…”

Section: Absorbing People and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ethical shopping was a popular topic of conversation among Jadwiga's friends, who distinguished themselves from those who shopped at chain stores such as those housed by the Galeria Krakówska shopping centre. Women in their twenties were quick to say (unprompted by interview questions, for example) that they considered a virtue of the socialist era was that it was ‘a society of repair’ (Tikhomirova : 303 quoting Gerasimova & Chuikina ; see also Gerasimova & Chuikina ). Jadwiga told me that ‘less was wasted, that's the first thing.…”

Section: Absorbing People and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furs can also provoke their wearer to associate sensuality with social position. Anna Tikhomirova writes of fur in Brezhnev‐era Russia:

[Women] verbaliz[ed] the desire to have a fur coat in terms of sensual perception (to touch the fur coat, the feeling of being ‘dressed in a fur coat’) … [S]uch perceptions varied from negative emotions such as complaints about the slight odour produced by a fur coat, to ecstatic ones … [T]he possession of a fur coat was, for ordinary intelligentsia women – particularly of the older generations – a sign of upward mobility from the working or peasant class (2010: 289).Analyses such as this suggest the potential of fur to become both part of the body and part of the self, reflecting or bolstering the class position of the women who wear it.…”

Section: Absorbing People and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Women who had experienced the socialist era were sometimes stereotyped as possessing a fondness for ‘French style’ (see Bartlett ; Tikhomirova ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Of love and fur: grandmothers, class, and pre‐mortem inheritance in a southern Polish city

Magee

2015

Royal Anthropological Inst

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This article analyses the pre-mortem alternate-generation inheritance of fur clothing in Kraków: a practice that speaks to the conventions of grandmother-granddaughter relationships and also to the connection between inheritance and social class. The perception of fur as a symbolically loaded material enhances its suitability for being 'kept in the family'. Clothing inheritance fosters bourgeois belonging over multiple generations, encouraging the patronage of selected spaces and services (including furriers). In the shorter term, however, generational differences within amicable grandmother-granddaughter pairs are amplified in part through the way pre-mortem inheritance practices highlight granddaughters' non-reciprocable debt to their grandmothers. A focus on fur as a particular kind of object highlights the significance of certain inheritance practices and their links to the affective ties in the reproduction of class in Poland. The article also contributes to a broader understanding of the reproduction of class by analysing the interconnections between taste, the body, and memory.In the Polish city of Kraków, 1 the sight of second-hand goods triggers speculation about the lot of the family to whom they have previously belonged. Assemblages of goods at komis (selling second-hand things 'on commission') and flea markets can imply ill fortune; they often quite clearly come from different homes, from individuals and families who perhaps knew each other, but probably not. Such items are not undesirable: not only do local people buy them but friends joked while scanning 'old-style' kitchen scales and portraits of anonymous sitters, 'Foreigners are crazy for things from the twentieth century: fascism ... socialism' . According to one owner of a second-hand shop, 'Things with words on sell well with tourists and with some young people, like art students: metal signs written in Polish, or Russian sometimes, are popular' .Newer second-hand goods do not capture the imagination in this way, nor are they as likely to appear for sale. Used yet relatively recently produced homeware and furniture from IKEA, clothes from H&M, and broken yet conceivably salvageable electrical goods are deposited on pavements for others to scoop up: a convenient divestment practice and, fortunately, also a public-spirited one.That fur clothing, the topic of my study, features in the list of 'provocative' old goods for sale was palpable when, shortly before finishing fieldwork, I set down a bs_bs_banner

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Section: Absorbing People and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Absorbing People and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Furs can also provoke their wearer to associate sensuality with social position. Anna Tikhomirova writes of fur in Brezhnev‐era Russia:

Section: Absorbing People and Placesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Women who had experienced the socialist era were sometimes stereotyped as possessing a fondness for ‘French style’ (see Bartlett ; Tikhomirova ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Of love and fur: grandmothers, class, and pre‐mortem inheritance in a southern Polish city

Magee

2015

Royal Anthropological Inst

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“…Scholars, concerned with ‘everyday life’ in Soviet Russia, present a wealth of material on the internal contradictions of official rhetoric about individual consumption, fashion and aesthetics that located these matters along a West/Soviet binary (Gurova, 2006; Tikhomirova, 2010; Zakharova, 2010). Volkov (2000) argues that in the mid-late 1930s, individual attendance to the body (grooming, fashion) went from being used by Soviet government officials as a mechanism for turning former peasants into cultured citizens of a modern state to being scorned as a bourgeois practice and alien to a communist society.…”

Section: Soviet Consumer Culture: a Historical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Searching for lost femininity: Russian middle-aged women’s participation in the post-Soviet consumer culture

Davidenko

2017

Journal of Consumer Culture

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In the existing literature, the relatively stable period of the 1970s, in Russia, is characterised by the rise of 'socialist consumer modernity', while the affluent 2000s were the time when a new phenomenon, 'the culture of glamour', emerged. Both periods parallel some cultural developments in the western world: the 1970s-1980s supposedly saw the rise of late modernity whereby individuals, freed from constraints of social structures, engage in ongoing process of self-reflexivity and self-fashioning, through consumption. In this article, drawing on the interviews with 20 middle-aged women from Moscow, I examine the limitations on self-fashioning as a means of achieving and maintaining a position of privilege. I particularly focus on the women's concerns about failing to engage in normative practices of self-care, including anti-ageing cosmetic procedures, and hence failing to embody feminine dispositions that had value in their middle-class milieu. The analysis of such concerns helps discern the ways different markers of identity (gender, class and age) interplay and act as enablers or constraints in the mundane struggle for power at the interpersonal level.

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Early Soviet Consumption as a First “Battle” on the Cultural Front

Skubii

2023

Consumption and Advertising in Eastern Europe and Russia in the Twentieth Century

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Soviet Women and Fur Consumption in the Brezhnev Era

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Of love and fur: grandmothers, class, and pre‐mortem inheritance in a southern Polish city

Of love and fur: grandmothers, class, and pre‐mortem inheritance in a southern Polish city

Searching for lost femininity: Russian middle-aged women’s participation in the post-Soviet consumer culture

Early Soviet Consumption as a First “Battle” on the Cultural Front

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