Eastern Europe: The New Class

• Share

At her salon door lies a fluffy pink doormat. Her terrace overlooks a river that winds through one of Europe's most romantic cities, the ancestral home of many of the Continent's most dashing and beautiful women. "My clients prefer the styles of Chanel and Givenchy," coos the grey-haired grande dame of haute couture. But the city is not Paris, the river not the Seine, and madame is not Coco. She is Klara Rothschild of Budapest, oracle of fashion throughout Communist Europe, recipient of the Order of Labor in the People's Republic of Hungary, and at a state-paid salary of $20,000 a year, one of János Kadar's most generously valued national assets.

Trooping to Paris. True, Madame Klara's creations, which begin at the distinctly basse couture price of only $52 per dress, look rather a lot like last year's Givenchys and Chanels. Her evening gowns at times are even languidly reminiscent of the 1930s, when, as the daughter of a successful Hungarian couturier ("I was born on the cutting-room table"), she founded her establishment in the Budapest of Ferenc Molnar and Béla Bartók. Still, the fact that after postwar years of obscurity, she thrives today and retails her wares to the likes of Jovanka Tito, the Marshal's wife, illustrates a new wrinkle in dialectical materialism. Fashion, long considered frivolous and bourgeois, is once again fashionable throughout Eastern Europe.

Hungary, Czechoslovakia and East Germany sponsor state design institutes and couture houses. Poland's Jadwiga Grabowska, manager and chief designer of Warsaw's EWA style center, is frequently on television in her role as "the dictator of Polish fashion." Like her counterparts in other Red lands, she vies with Moscow to produce annual "socialistically styled" lines of dresses and sportswear, which are sent as exhibitions to foreign capitals, while troops of designers at the same time study the latest inspirations that Paris has to offer. Party newspapers and television urge women (and men) to dress more tastefully, and carry advice on dieting, cosmetics and hair care.

Traveling fashion exhibits tour the mountains of Transylvania and other remote areas to bring the message to peasant crones in babushkas. Even in Bulgaria, the most retarded nation of the bloc, the party journal Partien Zhi-vot recently reasoned: "We must not lag behind the more advanced countries in being attractively attired. Foreigners judge the superiority of our socialist way of life not only from our factories, building programs and roads, but also from the outward appearance of our people."