This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. He did so, he once said, to demonstrate “the right to one’s own taste.” In Warsaw, the jazz critic Leopold Tyrmand popularized the wearing of striped socks as well. The idea was that shirts and ties should clash. Brightly coloured shirts were popular too, since they contrasted so starkly with the conformist uniforms of the communist youth movements, as were wide, often hand-painted ties. Both favoured shoes with thick rubber soles - a distant echo of the American sneaker. The girls at first wore tight pencil skirts, though later they switched to fashions inspired by Christian Dior’s “New Look”: dresses with small waists and wide skirts, preferably in loud colours and patterns. Generally speaking, the boys favoured narrow, drainpipe trousers (in Warsaw there was a tailor who specialized in making them out of ordinary ones). The fashions adopted by these youth rebels varied slightly from country to country as well, depending on what was available in flea markets. And so, in the late 1940s - just as Western teenagers were beginning to discover long hair and blue jeans - East European teenagers living under Stalinist regimes discovered narrow trousers, shoulder pads, red socks and jazz. They couldn’t join political parties, they couldn’t protest and they couldn’t speak out. At the same time, they were less cowed by the horrors of a war, which they didn’t necessarily remember, and less intimidated by the prospect of prison, which they had yet to experience. They bore the brunt of the regime’s various campaigns and obsessions, they were sent round to collect the subscription money, gather signatures and organize rallies. They were the focus of the heaviest, most concentrated and most strictly enforced propaganda, which they heard at school and in their youth groups.
Not by accident, young people were the most enthusiastic of the passive resisters to High Stalinism, if “enthusiasm” is a word that can be used in this context.
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