"Our Country Endangered by Underwear": Fashion, Femininity, and the Seduction Narrative in Ninotchka and Silk Stockings

Abstract

In November 2000, the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg opened a new exhibition, “Lingerie of the Totalitarian Age,” which lifted “the veil on Stalinist bloomers and Brezhnev-era bras,” according to one newspaper.1 Almost four thousand museum goers visited each day “to marvel at the unsexy garments worn by their mothers and grandmothers—or in some cases, by their former selves.” One visitor, Tatyana Vasiliyevna, explained, “It would have been hilarious if it wasn’t so sad. For me and for all women of my generation, there was just no alternative. We couldn’t find anything else.” Another visitor, 17-year-old Olga, was thankful that she had avoided the “thick-cotton nightgowns and woolly winter drawers, in not-very-fetching-pinks”: “I’m lucky to be able to buy pretty, sexy underwear. When I think how our mothers and grandmothers had to wear all that stuff, I feel just awful.” Olga's depression was no doubt lifted by the final room of the exhibition, theming itself coyly around the “glasnost, or transparency, of Soviet lingerie during the Gorbachev years … which shows Russian underwear makers taking advantage of perestroika.”

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