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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