Haute Cou­ture, just like in any other other coun­try in the world, did have a place in the USSR. How­ever, it was a dif­fer­ent, iso­lated, strange and suf­fer­ing ele­ment, full of its own pecu­liar­i­ties and cat­fights. Two cat­walk mod­els, Leka Mironova and Tatiana Mikhalkova, rem­i­nis­cent about their jobs at the only Fash­ion House back in the USSR. Those were the days, my friend..!

Leka Mironova

I became a model by pure chance.   Once a friend took me along to a Fash­ion House on Kuznet­sky Most in Moscow, where some guy approached me and offered me a job as a cat­walk model. The guy turned out to be a young Slava Zayt­sev (who was to become a huge Russ­ian cou­turier, in due course). I accepted  – I didn’t make it to uni­ver­sity that year – and never regret­ted it.

The pay was about 76 rou­bles – hell, the clean­ers were get­ting 60! The hours were reg­u­lar, 9 till 6, five days a week.  A photo shoot would bring you about 90 rou­bles, and if you wanted extra work, each new set of clothes to wear was priced at a rou­ble. We were allowed to earn extra cash at other Fash­ion Houses, but it was tough, as the hours were get­ting really long.

The rewards were more intrin­sic, as you say – we, mod­els, tried to think of our­selves as of the ulti­mate con­vey­ors of phys­i­cal beauty and style appre­ci­a­tion to the Soviet women. It was quite rad­i­cal – the pro­pa­ganda went that none of it was nec­es­sary for hap­pi­ness or con­tent­ment. Our job, apart from being a “human hanger”, was to edu­cate women on style, pos­ture and poise.

Not only the pay was min­i­mal, we had to pay for every­thing our­selves – like, make up or per­fumes. It was expen­sive and also almost impos­si­ble to buy. The lucky ones, who got sent over­seas for fash­ion shows, had to bring it back for col­leagues in bulk quantities.

High heeled shoes were a huge deficit. I remem­ber, there were about ten pairs which belonged to the Fash­ion House, so some­times we had to wear those. If they were a size or two smaller – tough luck!

Another huge prob­lem was the under­wear. Oh boy, those Soviet panties –Yves Mon­tand, who saw it once, was puz­zled and then shocked. We were ordered to take it off and stay com­mando – which was unheard of, back in the 60s. I still laugh when I think of it.

The body stan­dards for the mod­els were state reg­u­lated, no less. There were three stan­dard sizes (say, small, medium and large), and you had to fit in.  How­ever, the good thing was that mod­el­ling was, indeed, a job for life. If you get preg­nant or put on a few sizes, you just start work­ing for a dif­fer­ent depart­ment, like mature clothing.

Tatiana Mikhalkova

It took me ages to adjust to mod­el­ling. First, back then clothes were far from plen­ti­ful: to wear one dress for a few days was nor­mal. So when we had to change dresses dur­ing the cat­walk shows, I just couldn’t get over the shock: it was unbe­liev­able, hav­ing access to clothes, let alone pretty clothes!

We would learn off each other how to do make up and hair – we were never pro­vided with make up or hair artists, these jobs didn’t exist back then. We never had move­ment coaches, either – to walk on the cat­walk is a skill, yet there is nobody to show you how to do it, how to cre­ate an image or how to deliver a mes­sage with your image.

The job itself was quite tedious – we had to walk really slowly in order to allow the groups of invited fash­ion design­ers (and stu­dents, and clothes­mak­ers and so on) to draw sketches of our dresses so they could repli­cate it later.

The police morale did exist back then, and it was after us, day and night. We were meant to be the face of the Russ­ian women (espe­cially when over­seas), so they really watched us behave. Like, the cur­few to be back to the hotel was 9pm, and it was strict.   Even the job itself was called “clothes demon­stra­tor”, no less, and what rep­u­ta­tion it had! It was a seri­ous effort to per­suade my par­ents to allow me to do it – they thought it was really dodgy.

Related posts:

1. Sexy Soviet Under­wear. Not!
2. Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Com­mu­nism. Part 1 of 2
3. Dirty Danc­ing Soviet Style
4. More pic­tures of Soviet Moscow 1960s by Mark Riboud
5. The 50^th Anniver­sary of the Soviet Union in Old Amer­i­can Mags