Objects, People, Politics: From Perestroika to the Post-Soviet Era

Abstract This article offers a political reading of the status of the object during the Perestroika years (1986–1991) and the immediate post-Soviet period in the early 1990s. Long-established Soviet cultural values and practices underwent a dramatic upheaval in everyday life and economy, as well as in art and fashion, which radically changed the ontological status of the object, and the relationship between the subject and the object. Focusing on three distinctive kinds of objects—austere, fragile and unruly—the article analyzes these changes through the practices of some leading players in art and fashion. Primary visual and textual research, as well as oral-history testimonials, are embedded in theoretical frameworks from art history, and fashion and cultural studies.