by Pyzik, Agata
The fashion column was one of the most important in Przekrój, and was basically a guide to how to do something and create a “look” out of basically nothing. It was initiated by Janina Ipohorska, but a few years later taken over by the young art historian Barbara Hoff, who ended up holding it for the next 50 years and becoming the first “fashion dictator” of Poland. The nation had to be taught once again how to dress well, and the national clothing and fabric production was so poor that in order to survive in style, one had to live by one’s wits more than ever. At the beginning, as Hoff has described in numerous interviews, this was an impossible task: when she realized there was nothing to write about, she asked the ministry for permission to produce a clothing line of her own. She travelled across Poland to factories, bought fabrics and ordered them to produce her fashionable, modern designs. They were still hardly available, yet Hoffland, as it was called, was, next to Moda Polska (simply “Polish Fashion”) one of the rare examples of the quasi-private, though officially nationalized fashion companies in Poland. Both have survived communism, and Hoff kept designing well into the 90s. You could be sure, that if Hoff wrote about a new style for wearing a shawl in her column, the same afternoon there would already be dozens of girls on the streets trying to copy this style. Her flagship idea was blackening the “coffin shoes” (i.e. light, paper shoes, used as footwear for the deceased) which when colored black could pass as elegant “ballerinas”. As Czech journalist Milena Jesenská wrote in 1929, from a perspective of a fashion columnist,
5.6 The unexpected return of the Thin White Duke in a book cover by socialist fashion dictator Barbara Hoff.
The fashion column is really for people for whom there is no fashion…The average person with an average job and an average salary cannot dress fashionably. She can, however, have superb clothes…It is up to her to make clothes for herself according to fashion, adapting to it without aping it. In short, the less money she has, the more art it takes to look good…While many people think for a rich person, she must think for herself. The fashion column in the newspaper is for people who love beautiful things and cannot afford them. Only these kinds of people make culture. Only these kinds of people have style: they are innovative, daring and modestly restrained. The desire for things cultivates taste…It is a rare art to look like a good human specimen, without much money or expenditure, through one’s own efforts and the proper organisation of one’s life.
The fashion column in Przekrój was doing exactly this: teaching people how to be artists, often how to make clothes on one’s own; how to create elegance out of nothing by paying attentions to details and creating visual sensitivity towards one’s everyday life. The images were accompanied by witty remarks and comments, and in this, those delicate drawings by Hoff still emanate an elegant, dandy austerity which we could look for in vain in today’s chain store driven fashion.
Only after making the everyday palatable, could the higher needs be fulfilled, like the need for beauty, aesthetics and art. In here is some of the greatest merit of Przekroj, which relentlessly propagated modern art (in visual arts and music) and abstraction, which extended to publishing “posters” with Picasso or Leger to pull out and hang on the wall in the modest socialist salons, giving away postcards of Polish abstract paintings to its readers or even selling abstract paintings painted by the artists-editors. It also was a vehicle to the post-Thaw eruption of the new, colorful design, associated today with the Festival of Youth in 1955 in Warsaw and Expo ’58 in Brussels.
Yet, if this was a ‘civilization’, then it had to be according to Norbert Elias’s definition, i.e., civilization as something created in the West. Przekroj supported the silent, careful rebirth of the ‘cool’ in Poland too. It was creating ‘positive snobbery’ for the abroad, but its sights were ceaselessly always turned to the Seine, not the Moskva. It discreetly cheer-led the birth of the new, casual Western elegance, e.g. in the person of Brigitte Bardot and the new kind of free, careless, self-conscious girl. From the 60s films of the Polish school, like Janusz Morgenstern’s Goodbye, See You Tomorrow, or Innocent Sorcerers by Andrzej Wajda, there emerges a certain kind of noblesse, even if produced with little money. This is the era when the youth prefer, rather than the rough sleazy American culture they pretended to have in the ’50s, a noble and stylish European version: they wear black and dark sunglasses, listen to jazz, are sexually liberated, looking like their counterparts in the later Nouvelle Vague. Or at least that was the image promoted in the suddenly liberated and West-friendly atmosphere of the 60s. This is the reason for the golden era in culture, art, film and design that ensues. Whereas elsewhere the 60s meant the most hectic time of social revolutions and upheavals, for the Bloc it meant that for the first time, consumerism was noble, as noble as art.
5.7 Socialist folk queueing for better clothing. But why in French? Cover of Przekroj authors fashion bible from 1958.
Przekroj was never a simple proletarian agit-prop of the authorities. It was neither bourgeois enough nor proletarian enough, said to be too westernized for the communist poputchiks, and too ideologized for the pro-Western intellectuals. It continued to be inconvenient even after 1989, when it wasn’t socialist in content at all. So why did the civilizational mission of ‘culturation’ in the new society have to be always understood as ‘liberal’ or ‘bourgeois’? To answer this question we have to come back to the previous divagations on the force of proletarian culture in Poland. And this wasn’t strong enough – aside from the beleagured efforts of the PPS or the Bund, liquidated by the war, or the efforts of Polish futurists and constructivists, there wasn’t much of a legacy to build upon. Or, one could say, the proletarian culture, of big cities and their industrial bases, was often Jewish, and disappeared together with their extermination. So anything culturally sophisticated was automatically suspicious (or celebrated) as being ‘bourgeois’. Yet it’s hard not to sympathize with the style of Przekroj, today inspiring only nostalgia for the sophistication of its language and good taste, which despite being egalitarian in its message, also tried to decompress the crude ideological information it had to provide.
Another level of the strange discrepancy between the official state policy in “bringing up the nation” and the practice was the strange existence of ‘luxury’ goods. While Przekroj’s strategy was to seduce, become the part of a life and then ‘raise’ its readers, Ty I Ja monthly was pretty elitist: a strange combination of an artist and luxury magazine, with an avant-garde lay-out designed by Roman Cieślewicz. Cieślewicz was a pioneer of animated film, pop-art and Neouveau Realisme in Poland, who later migrated to France to design for ELLE and became one of the most prominent Polish artists living in the West. Driving from surrealism and his own version of Pop, Cieślewicz’s covers invited the reader to dream, they were a window to the secret life of unexisting bourgeoisie, in the atmosphere of Bunuel’s Belle du Jour or the erotic tales of Walerian Borowczyk, another Parisian exile. It was expensive and presented haute-couture creations from Parisian fashion houses arranged in an artistic way, houses of artists and famous writers, in a way which didn’t at all correspond with anyone’s lives but those of the high officials.
A Festival of Youth
For the communist authorities one of the most important aspects of the everyday ideology was to keep home production on the level which, at least officially and in the local media and broadcasters was presented as being “as good as” the Western one. Maybe at the beginning, in the post-war years, when the countries were still in reconstruction, this aspect didn’t matter, as the whole world, including the West, was dealing with shortages and austerity for several years after the war, with rationing lasting even in the UK until the mid-1950s. It was difficult in the freshly socialist, war-destroyed Poland to explain to people the shortages in production and the low tempo of the growth of the infrastructure. Yet, from today’s point of view, the growth and reconstruction of Polish cities, given that it happened from scratch, was immense and on an unheard of scal
e. This progress occurred at the same time as the harsh introduction of the communist order, in which any remnants of the pre-war structures were leveled. One may say they were leveled by the Nazis first, but it still meant the new system had a once in a lifetime chance to change the social stratification of Poland.
5.8 Popularising abstract art. ‘Przekroj’s postcards adorned with funny quasi-proverbs.
To young people after the war, it didn’t necessarily matter what the big conflicts and the big history were about. For them, the matter of life, here and now, was what counted. This is shown well in several novels from the era, such as Skvorecky’s The Cowards or Leopold Tyrmand’s Zły (‘Badass’), which describe the lives of young people right after or a few years after the war. The material side of life, the body, sexuality, enjoyment appear here as the filter through which young people perceive and receive the world. For Skvorecky’s young Czechs, it didn’t matter if the girls they encountered were the ‘enemy’. In this way we can also understand the creeping youth revolt that was taking place, though it never really triumphed in the Soviet Bloc, but had its phases and levels. The youth revolt in the Soviet Bloc was weird, because it at the same time rebelled against and embraced, or at least tried to, the very Western “consumerism” and “conformism” the Western youth were contesting. But who was the real rebel here and who was the conformist? One of the most interesting views was offered by the writer, anti-communist and admirer of all things Western Leopold Tyrmand, in his banned 1954 Diary, long a cult book in Poland but never translated into English:
A great deal of anxiety about “clobber”. The last Monitor announces a great failure, i.e. a new law about duty put on packages sent to Poland from abroad. This is the end, really. How to even start to show the scale of the unhappiness? Not many realize that since the end of the war three quarters of the clothing consumption of the society is being satisfied by abroad. Actually, America, a dozen charity organizations. That was the militant period of Polish fashion: the elegance was battle dress…
“Clobber” and color were in a great way dangerous for the system, because they were direct, everyday. Against what they say that they want to give joy, gaiety, colorfulness and carelessness, communists want only greyness, not-being, a colorlessness which wouldn’t take the population away from their sacred ideals. Some kind of uniform ugliness leveled to the rank of moral norm – this is a new ideal of the common usage. They want to see us all in Stalinist jackets and overalls. Lack of charm is a virtue, the appeal of the looks is subversion. Hatred of originality, joy, brightness, individuality, eccentricity, is within communism organic, because every egalitarian ethics is about seeing good in the average and plainness. You can’t show a pretty girly face on a magazine cover. But Poles, even the most stupid ones, understood, that the style one dresses is in every era a function of beaux arts, and this way of dressing is in a way an act of resistance. No iron curtains consist a barrier to it.
Tyrmand identified the Soviet ideology with the lacklustre nature of its clothes and design. Yet today we all know how “emancipation via consumption” ends – somewhere in Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw’s epiphanies over Manolo Blahnik shoes. Fashion shows how the circumstances change the semantics of any object. In reality, the greyness of communism was another myth. But as the beauty of the system was meant to be one of the most visible and consistent elements of life under Eastern European socialism, surrounded from every side by images of idealized, fit but hunky workers, robotniks and robotnitze, looking at you from the monumental art, murals, buildings decoration, banners and streets, the viewer was not always gaining in the famous Stalinist “gaiety”.
5.9 Leopold Tyrmand’s novel ‘Badass’ (1955) was his protest against the new reality, by celebrating Warsaw demi-monde and reviving the pre-war city mythology (cover by Jan Mlodozeniec)
This chapter takes its title from one of Tyrmand’s phrases. The 1954 Diary is a unique document of late Stalinism in Poland. Tyrmand was shaped by a different system – from a Jewish intelligentsia family, he was sent to Paris for architectural studies and survived the war in a Nazi camp in Norway. In post-war Poland he tried to pursue a literary career, publishing in Tygodnik Powszechny (General Weekly), a Roman Catholic yet progressive magazine, still for a time allowed to publish with a light censorship. After Tygodnik’s liberal editors were fired all Tyrmand’s novels were pulled by the censors. Tyrmand was an example of a liberal, pro-Western intellectual, turned conservative in the clash with People’s Poland. His anti-communist crusades are today a record of what a non-communist intellectual, with the previous era in his memory, thought about the new reality. They have their limitations - Tyrmand was still very much indebted to the pre-war view of life and politics, and Western democracy remains an ideal for him, regardless of the political impossibility of its realization in Poland. A militant liberal, neither the anti-Semitic, nor nationalistic views prevalent in pre-war Poland made him embrace the new system. He became its most fervent critic, from a cultural and political point of view remaining a devotee of the West, deploring the new system’s shabbiness. While a petit-bourgeois in many of his cultural tastes, valuing the easy listening of Glen Miller as the highest form of civilization, this promoter of jazz and everything Western was one of the most colorful intellectuals of the Soviet period in Poland.
As I’ve stressed here, Poland in 1939 was an underdeveloped country, pervaded with all the problems of the time: financial crisis, nationalism, right wing dictatorship, anti-Semitism, xenophobia. Tyrmand chose to ignore the fact that even if the Second World War didn’t happen, in those conditions Poland would at best become a minor country massively dependent on the West. Yet for him, the fact as a part of the Warsaw Pact Poland didn’t have to rely on the West was insignificant. He believed that the biggest tragedy of living under the burden of real socialism was the drastic lowering of any aesthetic, spiritual and intellectual aspirations and expectations of men and women: a reality where the silent subjection of the individuals to the authorities was not enough – it also had to have power over their minds. Tyrmand’s critique referred especially to the earliest, harshest Stalinist phase of PRL. As a member of the intelligentsia, Tyrmand had little understanding and belief in the efficiency of the programme of equality. The so-called social advance of the people from countryside to the cities he regarded as disastrous. The omnipresent socialist rhetoric and the newspeak of Stalinism was to him the death of reason.
Many of Tyrmand’s fears cannot be completely dismissed as the typical classist fears of the intelligentsia, a la Ortega Y Gasset, hateful of the masses. Tyrmand saw correctly the abyss between the existing shortages and the promises of the authorities. His “Primer on Communist Civilization”, translated and published in 1972 in the USA as The Rosa Luxembourg Contraceptives Cooperative, is an alphabetically juxtaposed ‘komuna vocabulary’, with short chapters like ‘How to be/do x’ or ‘What is X’, within communism. Topics include ‘How to survive education’, ‘How to use a telephone’, ‘How to oppose’, ‘How to be a playboy’ or ‘How to be Jewish’. There’s also one on ‘How to be a woman’, where Tyrmand seemingly demolishes the new liberties and equal rights women gained in socialism. First of all, the ideas of equality in communism were always rotten, and the in the process of joining the physical hardship of workforce, women gave up their womanhood and turned into masculinized unhumans. All this rather banal misogyny wouldn’t interest us, were it not for the fact of how little has changed. In the new capitalism Polish women have in fact less freedom and are subjected to greater misogyny than under socialism, where at least basic freedoms, like abortion, contraceptives, and equality within the workplace were officially guaranteed.
But for all his reactionary devotion to the West and his final defection (where he pursued a career as a conservative/republican publicist and, interestingly, never wrote anything remotely as important as while living under communism), Tyrmand both observed and embodied something that was specific to Eastern Europea
n communism. In his writing he remains completely dependent, even mad about it. He constantly uses phrases and metaphors showing his lack of objectivism. He constantly uses the phrase ‘they’; ‘My attitude towards communism is my outcome of my life under communism’, he writes. Tyrmand often behaves as if he owned communism, completely unaware and uninterested what it might have meant for people outside of his milieu. Tyrmand, who was privileged under the socialist system, which gave free flats to the members of the writers union and supported them financially, couldn’t see the connection between the censorship and the privilege he was getting. The latter was transparent to him, and often he even speaks of it as just another form of repression.
5.10 To consume or not to consume. The new PRL generation (Innocent Sorcerers) by Wojciech Fangor, 1960.
Tyrmand was not the only intellectual in the communist state, who, while using all the privileges and being implicated in it, got a sudden myopia when criticizing its shortcomings. He took his derision of working women for a serious act of system critique, rather than simple misogyny. He often seems as if he’d like no women to work, or only middle class fashionably dressed women to do so. While seeing the poverty of the working class in post war Warsaw, he was blind to their newfound literacy; nor does he consider that giving jobs to these ‘masculinized’ women working in the city was a rather positive alternative to being imprisoned at home. Intellectual critics of the system couldn’t take the lower classes into account, because that would ruin their line of reasoning, in which the system is portrayed only as the evil slaughterhouse of aspirations.
