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Great expectations and unfulfilled dreams: the design and production of sportswear in the late USSR (1960s-1991)
This article focuses on the Sports Committee of the USSR and, in particular, highlights the role played by the Moscow-based House of Sportswear Prototypes (DMSO). This organization hired artists and fashion designers to develop prototypes that offered both aesthetic and functional innovations. Our research identifies three stages in the development of the Soviet sportswear industry in the post-Second World War period: the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the two decades from 1960 to 1980 and from then to 1991. It also explores the Soviet attempt to create a non-capitalist system of selection and development of products for mass production. It highlights the opening of the specialized design center, the DMSO, in 1962, whose fashion designers were responsible for the whole range of sportswear. This pioneering move was not successful, however, as problems emerged within the structure of the planned economy. These problems included the complexity of coordinating the different actors in the supply chain, tensions between designers and factories and an industrial structure within which the mass production of sporting goods did not operate as an independent industry. There were also problems with the related industries that developed and supplied new production machines as well as new artificial raw materials and there were issues of industrial exchange.
From the 1960s, the industry adopted a new approach for sportswear by adapting to aesthetic trends as a desirable feature of modernity. It invited fashion professionals to apply their design practices to a wide range of sportswear, from performance cloth to mass-produced items for a broad range of consumers. This analysis challenges the perception that interactions between the fashion industry and the mass sportswear industry is a relatively new phenomenon that only emerged in the 2000s.