The Griboedov Channel. The bridges St Petersburg is so famous for.
By many, St Petersburg (Leningrad in 1924 – 1991) is often considered to be so beautiful due to its architecture of Italian origin. Quite strange to see these fine buildings embellished by the symbols of the Soviet Era. Let’s take a walk around this fine city in the summer almost 30 years ago.
All images are by Lisa Larsen, for LIFE magazine.
In 1956 an array of British designers were trying to expand their market share into the Soviet Union. So a fashion week of some sort took place — in Moscow, Gorky Park, twice daily the shows took place. What a huge success it was! Every day it was a full house, and the public were in love with the British models and the fashion. Jeans, for instance, were very trendy and could cost as much as a month’s salary — yet one still had to queue up to get a pair.
However, after so much ado, not a single British clothing company ever received any Soviet offers of cooperation. Sad, really — just like Christian Dior in Moscow, it could have been a beginning of a beautiful friendship.
Museum, Moscow, 1960s
This is our third post devoted to Marc Riboud, an outstanding French photographer, who traveled extensively throughout the Soviet Union. His images captured an array of everyday life episodes from the lives of the Soviet people. Here is the first lot — and here is the second one. As always, click on the magnifying glass icon to see the photos in detail.
1959. The official photo shoot, images courtesy of LIFE archives (Howard Sochurek)
The Khrushchev’s Thaw was to bring change to many aspects of the Soviet life, and fashion was one of them. The decision to allow the Soviet fashion designers to learn off their French counterparts was made as high as at the government level, which implicitly put fashion above politics or international ideological regimes. The colour of the Soviet Union, a generic grey, was about to be mixed up with the motley and lithe palette of the French fashion.
Late 1960s. Actress Svetlana Svetlichnaja is doing a wee strip dance for a movie. This was probably the most R-rated scene of the Soviet cinematography.
Due to a series of not so fortuitous events ( the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, the First World War, the overall rundown of the young Soviet country) women never had their needs attended to properly. Underwear was made, first and foremost, for the working class with no preferential treatment for the females so women had no choice other than to wear those sexless garments. This is probably the saddest part of the Soviet history.
Welcome!
As previously stated, the majority of people in the USSR lived in the apartments. Unfortunately, due to the the time constraints, they had to be built in a speedy rather than comfortable manner. After the war, when accommodation was extremely scarce, a three bedroom flat could accommodate up to 16 people (four average families), with one shared kitchen and one shared bathroom. The quality of living there was truly horrendous. So when Khruschev started his building binge in 1960s, a joke went that the legacy of those communal flats was agoraphobia – the fear of open spaces and the tendency to hoard things. Well, if you spent your formative years in a pokey flat where you’d have to dry your laundry next to the stove, you’d be just as agoraphobic.
So let’s look at the main trends in the interior design Soviet style.