Fashion behind the Iron Curtain. Reflections on a Book by Anna Pelka about Youth Fashion in the People’s Republic of Poland and the German Democratic Republic

Abstract

The history of youth fashion behind the Iron Curtain (and more extensively — an analysis of youth fashion at the time of “real socialism”) is but no means an unexplored field in the social sciences, both Polish and German. The prime asset of the publication by Anna Pelka: Z [politycznym] fasonem. Moda młodzieżowa z PRL i NRD (Gdańsk 2014) is its comparative perspective of analysing the titular topic. Another merit is the research maturity of the author who appreciates that fashion was closely linked with the socio-political context in which the population of People’s Poland and the GDR lived. This is the reason why the at times detailed descriptions of clothes imperceptibly turned into an element of complex problems from the realm of state policy, the activity of the opposition, cultural transformations or assorted phenomena of independent culture.
The topic of fashion has thus been treated as part of the history of culture and counter-culture, the sexual revolution and the perception of sex, as well as one of the themes of propaganda and censorship and the problems faced by the command-
-and-quota economy, and, finally, as a key for studying the enclaves of freedom in states disclosing totalistic tendencies; the author immersed all these components in a comparative approach. This key also permitted her to penetrate such ostensibly distant domains as central economic plans, the production of special textiles, world youth days, emigration, The Rolling Stones concerts, and punk sub-culture.
In this manner Pelka has become part of an extremely prolific current of Polish historiography, worth supporting and approaching the latest history of Poland as if from a grass-roots level, i.e. involving not the most significant events and political evolution but the, at first glance, secondary social phenomena thanks to which “great history” gains a new dimension and an extensive context.