Let the music play: ‘Hipsters’ and heteronormative fashion

Abstract

The article examines how fashion assists in emphasizing heteronormativity in the musical film Hipsters (2008). The film is about the first countercultural phenomenon in the Soviet Union – Stiliagi. Predominantly men, these young people adapted different styles of dress, language, behaviour and dance that they felt was closely copying the styles of western cultures such as Teddy Boys. While the movement that started in the late 1940s and continued to the early 1960s included heterosocial behaviour, the film that presumably recreates the affective feeling of the culture distorts the history to spotlight heterosexuality and the search for individual freedom. It argues that given that historically and currently, the association between fashion and masculinity in the Russian culture is understood as effeminate, the film had to create clear heteronormative relationships between the male and female protagonists while emphasizing fashion and consumption. The article demonstrates how the film works within post-Soviet ideology by comparing the use of fashion in the film and the historical data about the actual Stiliagi movement of the 1950s. By negating the heterosocial and heterosexual relationship, the film created an artificial understanding of the Soviet culture. It follows the official ideological doctrine of creating nostalgia for the simpler yet somewhat stifled life in the Soviet Union without attracting the audience’s attention to the repressions of the post-Stalin Soviet Union.