Appalling Apollos

Crowds enviously studied the windows of Moscow's new Mosodezhda men's wear store last week, eying the fancy suits, coats, smokingi and fraki (tails). But inside, clerks told disappointed shoppers that these were "future" models. All they had for sale was the familiar old line of $80 and $120 suits, featuring outmoded double-breasted jackets and bell-bottomed trousers. "A drab selection," scribbled one customer in the shop's complaint book. "No quality suits. I am shocked, filled with indignation." "Outrageous," wrote another. "Patterns bad, workmanship careless."

Sensing that the New Soviet Man might be getting a bit impatient with the shabby, shoddy clothes so long accepted as the badge of well-dressed Soviet citizenship, Izvestia sent two reporters to a clothing industry convention at Riga (which considers itself "the Paris of the Baltic"). Helped perhaps by the fact that their editor is none other than Nikita Khrushchev's son-in-law, enterprising Aleksei Adzhubei (TIME, Sept. 21), the newsmen got some pungent answers to their queries as to why Soviet readymade clothes are so ill-styled, ill-tailored and ill-fitted.

"Our suits don't look well on ordinary Russians," conceded Vasily Popkov, chief of the garment industry's Central Clothing Institute, "because they are tailored for Apollo. Our designers conceive of the customer in just two dimensions--height and chest width--and assume that for their other measurements all their customers will be proportioned exactly as Apollo." But far from being Apollos, Russians tend to be short and broad, and if anything getting broader. Moscow University's anthropology department, said Popkov, has just finished a survey which shows that only 43% of all Soviet citizens could fit the readymade clothes now being produced.

A clothing-factory manager joined in. "We never know what fabrics we are going to receive tomorrow or the day after. This fall they sent us some light stuff suitable for topcoats. But the factory was already making winter overcoats with fur collars. Nichevo! We have to attach black fur collars to light topcoats. And the same thing happens with the collars as with the cloth. We use whatever they send us. We sew cheap fur onto an expensive overcoat." Result: there are 342 state "ateliers" in Moscow alone--not to mention myriads of moonlighting private "tailors" employing Russia's ancient talent with the needle--doing a roaring trade in tailoring and alterations.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.