Authors

Natasha Vinnikova¹;  ¹ University of the Arts London, UK

Discussion

This paper explores the capacity of screen costume in fashioning women’s social position during the Thawing period, with an emphasis on the representation of the main heroines Lida and Vava in Herbert Rappaport’s musical film Cheremushki (1963).
The film depicts the everyday lives of ordinary Soviet people in an unconventional stylistic way, amalgamating social realism and fantasy story. With over 28 million viewers at the time of its release, the film was a great success thanks to its music, romantic plot, relatable story line and visual effects.
The paper demonstrates how women’s representation embodies the new ideological intensity of the Khrushchevian time and how fashion becomes instrumental in communicating newly emerged modernity. It focuses on how the sartorial choices of Cheremushki’s two main protagonists mirror the Thawing aesthetic requirements, establishing a shorthand for viewers’ understanding of a negative and a positive heroine. It argues that these choices negotiate the ideological traditions of the time and mediate women’s portrayal as symbolic bearers of societal norms and moral standards.
In its analysis of the heroines’ clothing as a code to decipher the characters and their position within Soviet society, the paper resorts to Djurdja Bartlett’s (2010) concept of the ‘socialist good taste’ as the aesthetic expression of socialist official norms. Discussing the ways in which the female protagonists are defined against each other, the paper refers to Stela Bruzzi’s (1997) schema of “the mirroring pattern”. It draws on Emma Widdis’ (2008) discussion of character juxtaposition to demonstrate how costuming, women’s position, traditional societal norms and the ideological beliefs of the time were all intertwined.