By BERT WHYTE
Tribune Staff Correspondent

MOSCOW

NCE upon a time—and not

so long ago at that—tour-

ists visiting the Soviet

Union used to return home and

tell stories of how poorly the

Russian people dressed, in com-
parison with the West.

Those days have gone forever.

The USSR, celebrating the
50th year of its existence, not
only surpasses the Western
world in its social services—free
and universal education and
medicare—but is challenging it
in the field of fashion. Modern
Soviet fashions are posing a real
threat to the long-time suprema-
cy of Paris, Rome and London.
Nowhere is this better illustrat-
ed than at the International
Fashion Festival in the Palace of
Sports at Luzhniki Park.

More than 1,000 firms from
26 countries are taking part.
Beautiful models from 22 coun-
tries are demonstrating the lat-
est styles from top fashion
houses. About one and a half
million people are expected to
crowd through the turnstiles be-
fore the closing date in Septem-
ber. Some 600 newspaper corres-
pondents from abroad are cov-
ering the events. Foreign visitors
come from Europe and Asia,
America and Australia—and in-
clude clothing specialists from
such countries as Britain, France,
Italy, Austria, Japan, Finland, the
United States, Poland, Hungary,
India, Czechoslovakia and many
others.

Soviet Premier Kosygin, in his
report to the 23rd Congress of
the CPSU, said that during the
five-year plan “a _ substantial
change will take place in indi-
vidual branches of the national
economy, with emphasis on the
production of consumer goods.”
Light industry in the USSR is
making steady progress. By 1970
the three and a half million
workers in light industry will
have upped their total output
1.4 times.

Before the Exhibition opened
and the crowds came roaring in,
I paid a visit to Sokolniki Park
and walked through most of the
pavilions, admiring the chic of
the French, the far-out British,
Hungarian and Italian styles and
the Finnish sportswear. But I
was particularly impressed by
the exhibits in the three Soviet
pavilions, and by the bold imagi-
nation and innovations of Soviet
style designers.

It is a tough job to provide
234 million people with clothes
and shoes. No wonder that after
the Second World War, in which
some 20 million Soviet citizens
lost their lives and 1,700 cities
and towns were destroyed, the
main task of light industry was
to produce utilitarian clothes. At
that time quality had to take
second place to quantity.

Today all has changed, and
Soviet. consumers are demanding
better styles, better quality goods
—and in sufficient quantity to
meet their ever-growing de-
mands. By 1970 production of fa-
brics will increase 1.3 times and
knitted goods about twice, as
compared with 1965. The more
goods appear in shops, the more
customers demand improvement

SOCIALISM IN. STYLE

in style and quality. In our time,
when television and jet planes
have made the world a smaller
place, it is natural that styles
should easily cross boundaries
and result in a certain uniform-
ity of fashions. All the same,
each nation has its specific style,
and fashion designers .borrow
from the folk costumes and dec-
orative art of their respective
countries.

September 15, 1967—PACIFIC TRIBUNE—Page 8

Fashions appear absurd at two
stages in their brief span of life
—when they are coming in and
when they are going out. Lead-
ing Soviet fashion designers rely
heavily on folk costumes aS a
basis for new styles. One exam-
ple is the way in which the
traditional Russian shirt has
been adapted to women’s and
children’s wear. Another is the
jacket with hood modelled on its
prototype, the fur coat of the
native peoples of the Far North.

The achievements of chemis-
try in recent years means new
fabrics are constantly coming on
the market. Synthetic fibres are
extensively used—lavson, nitron,
acetate rayon and so on. Wom-
en’s dress styles are more varied
and change more rapidly than
men’s. There are 126 million. wo-
men in the Soviet Union and it
isn’t easy to satisfy them all.
Generally speaking, women’s
dress is characterized by straight
shoulder lines, a supple line‘ at
the waist, and a short skirt.
Though there is some talk of Pa-
risian couturiers dropping skirts
several inches below the knee, it
is unlikely that Soviet girls will
abandon their above-the-knee
skirts for at least two or three
years.

A great deal of attention is
paid to the designing of chil-
dren’s clothes, and each Soviet
fashion house has a group of art-
ists working in this field. The
basic idea is that clothes help
develop a child’s aesthetic views,
so they should be attractive as
well as convenient and practical.
As the USSR is a workers’ state,
it is only natural that fashion
houses also design overalls and
other types of working clothes.
Overalls of spark-proof fabrics
are designed for electric welders,
for instance; while overalls for
steel workers are made from
fabrics of wool or asbestos
which do not burn easily.

One cannot talk of ciothes
without discussing Russian furs.
Buyers from around the world
attend the fur auctions in Lenin-
grad and annually purchase some
four million pelts of karakul, sa-
ble, squirrel, mink, polar fox,
muskrat and marten. Natural
furs have been in fashion longer
than any other type of clothing
— ever since the days of the
caveman, in fact. And no coun-
try has furs of better quality
than the Soviet Union. Just try
and find a woman anywhere who
wouldn’t be delighted to own a
Russian sable coat, the dark fur
of which sparkles like jewels. Or
some women might prefer moun-
tain marten, the second most ex-
pensive fur—thick, soft, lighter
in color than sable. And, of
course, there’s always mink.

The International Clothing Ex-
hibition doesn’t confine itself to
clothes. On display are all kinds
of modern machinery and exhib-
its reflecting today’s level in the
development of designing and
manufacturing of clothes. New
trade contracts will be made with
many countries. Mechanization
and automation proceeds apace.
Electronic computers are widely
used here for planning and regu-
lating the supply of materials. In
mass production of ready-made
clothes automation. helps solve
many difficult problems.

HE power, hopes and victo-
ries of Canada’s labor
songs were gutted on

CBC’s “A Century of Song,”
which was billed as songs devo-
ted to the labor movement. As
if out to prove that the Canadian
labor movement will have to
provide its own groups to sing
labor songs, The Travellers took
this fighting music and rendered
it down into something between
pop-rock and nursery ditties.

It was good, nevertheless, to
see any attempt made to bring
out the story in music of the
history of the working people
The fact that not even the anti-
septic treatment by the Travel-
ers could completely destroy the
message, testifies to the streigth
of working peoples’ music.

The half hour effort-was done
on the background of film clips
of great moments in Canadian
labor history: the Winnipeg
General Strike, the Springhill
mine disaster. These historic
shots, plus, at times, Frank
Willis’ running commentary,
gave the listener an idea of the
reason for associating the pro-
gram with labor history.

Fine songs, with lines like:
“| There is power, there is
power in the:band of working
men .. .” were sung without
power; and Solidarity Forever,

with the age old message,
“Yet what force on earth
is weaker than. the ~ feeble

strength of one?” gave the lis-
tener anything but a sense of
unity and strength.

Two exceptions shone through.
One was the treatment of the

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