The Avant-Gardes, Utopias, and Clothes

Abstract

The author presents two instances in which quotidian overalls were in the early twentieth century transformed into projects with utopian potential: in Italy into tuta and in Russia into prozodezhda. The first was one-piece overalls that were warmly embraced by the Italian population after the First World War. They were a project associated with Futurism and utopianism. Before the war a somewhat similar project (the “anti-neutralist” clothes) was launched by Futurists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero. Less than a decade after this early Futurist intervention in clothing, the tuta was created. Independently of the Italian tuta appeared its Russian equivalent, i.e. “production clothes” (prozodezhda). Earlier the overalls were used by mechanics and aviators. Around 1920 they became a symbol of the new post-October revolutionary society, wherein human relations and “post-art” creativity were intended to significantly diverge from traditional notions such as art, the artist, and the artwork. The Artist-Constructor, who was to be more of an engineer than an artist, was to replace the obsolete bourgeois artist and the bourgeois institution of art. In Bauhaus a Slovenian artist, Avgust Černigoj, was fascinated by the overalls worn by Moholy-Nagy, and wore them upon his return to Ljubljana to the consternation of the local populace. In the 1980s this fashion was followed by another artist, namely Dragan Živadinov.