"This book explores the impact of Westernization on Russia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and presents a wealth of photographs of ordinary Russians in all their finery. Christine Ruane draws on memoirs, mail-order catalogues, fashion magazines, and other period sources to demonstrate that Russia's adoption of western fashion had symbolic, political, and social ramifications and was inseparably linked to the development of capitalism, industrial production, and new forms of communication. This book shows how the fashion industry became a forum through which Russians debated and formed a new national identity."--BOOK JACKET

• Fashion and ethnicity
• Fashion and social status
• Fashion and gender
• Fashion and capitalism
• Sources
• The emperor's new clothes: the creation of a fashion industry
• The creation of a market for European dress
• Textiles
• The development of European custom tailoring and dressmaking
• Apprentices
• Journeymen
• Masters
• The gendering of sewing in Russia
• Russian women's education and vocational training
• Charity and young women's education
• Sewing and the "woman's question"
• The sewing machine
• Sewing, prostitution, and vocational training
• Sewing and elementary education for girls
• The rise of ready-to-wear
• The origins of the sweatshop
• New technologies
• Tariffs and imported clothing
• M. and I. Mandl' Company
• Women's work and the needle trades
• Peasant women and the needle trades
• Factory women and the law on night work of 1885

• The rise of romantic nationalism
• Dress in the age of realism
• Dress and the discovery of the Narod
• Dress and the rise of Russian modernism
• The 1903 winter costume balls
• Lev Bakst and the Ballet Russes
• Adorned in dreams: fashion, labor, and politics
• The origins of the garment workers' labor movement
• Labor unrest in the pale of settlement
• The strike movement in Gomel'
• A radical garment worker
• The 1905 Petersburg general strike
• The 1906 Mandl' strike
• The 1913 Petersburg citywide strike
• The war on fashion
• Fashion and its critics
• The economic war
• The war against German domination
• The Moscow pogrom
• The Singer Sewing Machine Company
• The ban on luxury goods

• The first technical and vocational congress and sewing
• The fashion press in imperial Russia
• The origins of the fashion press in Europe and Russia
• The fashion press in Russia, 1830-1870
• Early marketing strategies
• The rise of the modern fashion magazine, 1870-1917
• Competition for the fashion market
• Government censorship and publication difficulties
• Clothes shopping in imperial Russia
• Shopping and national identity
• The introduction of Western stores in Russia
• Russian shops and trading rows
• Western versus Russian shopping
• Shopping as a social phenomenon
• Urban shopping
• Expansion of shopping outside the two capitals
• Mail-order catalogues
• The Singer Sewing Machine Company in Russia
• Shopping as a gendered phenomenon
• Adorned in dreams: clothing and national identity
• Eighteenth-century debates about dress