The term “cosmic-minded comrade” in the title of this essay is loosely borrowed from Robert Bird, who refers to Soviet writer Andrei Platonov as a “cosmist-minded comrade.” See Bird, “How to Keep Communism Aloft: Labor, Energy, and the Model Cosmos in Soviet Cinema,” e-flux journal, no. 88 (2018) →.
Details and precise dates of Andreeva’s education and work life can be found in her personal file in the archive of the Moscow Union of Artists, at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI), Moscow, f. 2943, op. 13, ed. khr. 38.
See the discussion of early postwar fabric designs in N. Zhovtis and S. Zaslavskaia, “Kto prav? Pis’mo khudozhnikov-tekstil’shchikov,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 1 (1961): 8.
A. Glotova, “Novyie risunki dlia nabivnykh tkanei,” Chelnok, June 3, 1954. The weekly newspaper Chelnok was the organ of “the Party Committee, the Factory Committee, the Komsomol Committee, and the Director’s Office of the Red Rose Factory,” as stated on its masthead.
On the need to prepare for the Festival of Youth, see the caption for the photograph of Andreeva and Zhovtis in Chelnok, January 4, 1957, and the discussion in Ksenia Guseva and Aleksandra Selivanova, Tkany Moskvy (Muzei Moskvy, 2019), 139. The latter is a comprehensive catalog for an exhibition of the same name (“Textiles of Moscow”), which has inaugurated the study of postwar Soviet textiles; it has been an invaluable resource for this essay.
I. A. Alpatova, “Novoe v tkaniakh,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo, no. 5 (1961): 9.
Alpatova writes that in some fabrics, geometric patterns can look schematic or harsh, while others can delight the eye with the clarity of contour and the sharpness of the color combinations, demonstrating that geometric patterns were not dismissed out of hand as “formalist” (the Soviet code word for modernism); see Alpatova, “Novoe v tkaniakh,” 9.
Alpatova attributed the “Ladoga” design to both Andreeva and her Red Rose colleague Natalia Zhovtis, but the original design drawing, held in the Andreeva family archive, is signed only by Andreeva; see the Andreeva collection held at the Emmanuel Layr Gallery, Vienna. Andreeva and Zhovtis collaborated frequently, and from 1960 Zhovtis held the position of “head artist” (glavnyi khudozhnik) at Red Rose, so the double attribution may reflect a collaborative creative process based on Andreeva’s original design, or even a courtesy to Zhovtis as the leader of the collective.
Alpatova likewise attributes the “Cheremushki” design to both Andreeva and Zhovtis, although, as with “Ladoga,” the design drawing appears in the Andreeva archive with her sole signature and is attributed to her alone in the Textiles of Moscow catalog; see Guseva and Selivanova, Tkany Moskvy, 143, 158–59. The “Cheremushki” design had likely entered fabric production by 1961, when it was chosen to be reproduced as the background of the letter by Zhovtis and Zaslavskaia, “Kto prav?,” in Dekorativnoe iskusstvo; see the discussion of this provocative letter below.
Nina Mertsalova, “Kostium i tkan’,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 8 (1960): 26. Mertsalova notes that “models” of this clothing—presumably one-off samples—were exhibited in the decorative arts section of the major art exhibition “Soviet Russia” in Moscow in 1960.
N. Kaplan, “Siuzhetnye risunki na tkaniakh,” Dekorativnoe iskusstvo SSSR, no. 11 (1961): 21. Kaplan attributes this fabric design to both Andreeva and Zhovtis, and names the Moscow landmarks shown on it: the Bolshoi theater and the TsUM department store; the Kremlin; the banks of the Moscow River; and new housing complexes.
The drawing is titled and dated on the back in Andreeva’s hand; see the Andreeva collection at the Emmanuel Layr Gallery, Vienna. Judging by the uniformity of her hand, it appears that Andreeva went through all her drawings at a point later in life, dating them and giving them titles from memory. It is therefore difficult to verify this information, except in cases where published or other archival sources corroborate it.
For examples of commemorative Russian scarves from the 1890s, see Tkany Moskvy, 40–41. There are numerous references to the production of commemorative scarves in Chelnok. A 1947 article discussing preparations for the eight hundredth anniversary of the city of Moscow and the thirtieth anniversary of the October Revolution discusses an Andreeva scarf design that “picturesquely resolves the theme of the abundance of our Motherland.” See A. Glotova, “Krasnorosovtsy gotoviat k 800-letiu,” Chelnok, July 14, 1947. Another Glotova article from 1954 announces that the Red Rose artists have been given the task of designing souvenir scarves depicting “the attractions and picturesque nature of the sanatoria of our country”; see Glotova, “Novyie risunki dlia nabivnykh tkanei.” The drawing for Andreeva’s Gagarin scarf design is held in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, while a test copy of the actual scarf is held in the Historical Museum, Moscow.
See “London Welcomes Major Gagarin,” The Times, July 12, 1961, 20; for more on the crowds thronging around him, see “Crowd Traps Yuri in the Jewel Tower,” Manchester Daily News, July 13, 1961, 13. Gagarin visited Manchester on July 12 at the invitation of the Amalgamated Union of Foundry Workers (AUFW).
Diana Pulson, “A Very Elegant Invasion from behind the Iron Curtain,” Liverpool Daily Post, July 7, 1961.
“Russians Trade Ideas and Yuri Badges,” Manchester Daily News, July 13, 1961, 13.
The caption of the photograph identifies Andreeva and her companion Zoya Yartseva as members of the Soviet textile delegation. Yartseva worked as a textile designer at the Sverdlov silk factory in Moscow from 1934 to 1969. See her personal file in the archive of the Moscow Union of Artists, RGALI, f. 2943, op. 13, ed. khr. 38.
For a recent example of scholarship on Soviet space-themed material culture that does not include fashion or textiles, see Alexander Semenov, “The Soviet Space Euphoria,” in Retrotopia: Design for Socialist Spaces, ed. Claudia Banz (Kunstgewerbemuseum, 2023).
The term “space-race fashion” is used today primarily to describe clothing design in France and the United Kingdom, and fashion photography and journalism in the US, in the 1960s and early 1970s. See Suzanne Baldaia, “Space Age Fashion,” in Twentieth-Century American Fashion, eds. Linda Welters and Patricia A. Cunningham (Berg, 2008).
Tat’iana Strizhenova, “Tekstil’,” in Sovetskoe dekorativnoe iskusstvo 1945–1975, ed. Vladimir Tolstoy (Iskusstvo, 1989), 61.
“Khudozhniki k iubileiu,” in Moda, special issue of Zhurnal mod, Winter 1967–68, n.p. We have not yet been able to determine Chizhonkova’s first name.
On the philosophy of Russian cosmism and its continued effects in Soviet cultural production in the 1930s, see Bird, “How to Keep Communism Aloft.”
A reversible fabric produced in 1961 for women’s coats, in a pattern of ochre spots on black, was named “Comet” (kometa); see the illustration in Alpatova, “Novoe v tkaniakh,” 6. For a good selection of abstract or geometric fabrics produced by Soviet factories in the 1960s and ’70s, see Tkany Moskvy, 178–83.
The decree is discussed in T. Kornacheva, “Mastera priatnykh novinok,” Chelnok, April 13, 1961.
O. Stuzhina, untitled notice, Chelnok, July 28, 1960.
See Kornacheva, “Mastera priatnykh novinok.”
N. Zhovtis, “Priniato na otlichno,” Chelnok, February 10, 1965.
“Etogo trebuet potrebitel’,” Chelnok, March 12, 1964, 1.
“Budut novye risunki,” Chelnok, March 12, 1964.
Zhovtis and Zaslavskaia, “Kto prav?”
On the reluctance of seamstresses to work with new fabrics, see I. Makhonina, “Luchshii sud’ia—pokupatel’,” Chelnok, February 24, 1978.
See, for example, Samuel Goff, “The Soviet Textile Artist Who Wove Together Technology and the Avant-Garde,” Elephant, August 14, 2020 →.
When Andreeva attended the Textile Institute in Moscow in the late 1930s, a number of the teachers were artists and theorists who had been active in the 1920s, and would have been in a position to show students works by the constructivists, even if these works could not be taught officially as part of the school curriculum. In particular, Aleksei Fedorov-Davydov, an art historian who had been active in the Soviet art world of the 1920s and had worked with avant-garde artists, was an important mentor to Andreeva.
On the model of constructivism as an intervention into the production process itself, see Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (University of California Press, 2005); on Constructivism as dedicated to the production of new objects for the new everyday life, see Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (MIT Press, 2005).
The literature on Stepanova’s and Popova’s textile design work is extensive; see for example Iuliia Tulovskaia, “Risunki dlia tkani khudozhnikov avangarda,” in Tkany Moskvy, 70–79; and Christina Kiaer, “The Russian Constructivist Flapper Dress,” chap. 2 in Imagine No Possessions.
According to Bird, “There is, Platonov suggests, the possibility of a different economy, one yet to be defined, let alone achieved, where natural limitations like gravity, entropy, and perhaps even death will not have to be resisted so forcefully, where the flight of socialism will become effortless, free, and final. This would be communism, albeit in a version that owes as much to the cosmism of Nikolai Fedorov and Aleksandr Bogdanov as it does to Marx and Lenin.” Bird, “How to Keep Communism Aloft.”