Selling the '70s at a Markup

Somebody once said that the Berlin Wall had to come down because West Germany needed a new market for its second-hand cars. By the same lights, I suppose, the Iron Curtain had to come down because leisure-wear manufacturers in the West had to find somewhere to sell all those shell-suits they had lying around in warehouses with no place else to go. Yes, folks, freedom; and freedom was just another word for being able to walk the streets wearing polyester track-tops and trousers in turquoise, puce, lavender, phosphorus yellow and day-glo green -- all at the same time. That, and driving third-hand cars from West Germany, of course. Oh, and eating bananas.


The first rule was: If it was made in the West -- or looked like it had been -- then it had to be good: anything, everything: bin-ends and loss leaders and brands of scotch, vodka and blackberry-and-ginger cordial that nobody in the West had ever heard of. Rule No. 2 -- and it was a basic rule of capitalism after all -- was "Buy cheap and sell dear." And thousands upon thousands of Russians embraced this with abandon. Anyone who could get over the border and muster anything from a truck to a packing-case got into the act, bringing back used clothing, dildos, inflatable mattresses, digital watches: anything the West didn't want any more. I know of one Czech who started with a bundle or two of this kind of thing, and now has his own polo team. I know of another who brought soft drinks to Moscow and printed his own labels. His product was at first refused by retailers on the grounds that no one would take it seriously if it didn't have a Western bar-code. So he simply xeroxed the bar-code off something of his wife's and laughed all the way back to his English bank. If anyone in Moscow had had an electronic bar-code reader at the time, he would have read on the side of every one of this man's soda bottles: Marks and Spencer's full-support bra, 38D: ?10.99.


The result of this gobbling up of the goods of the West's past lent, well, a certain retro feel to the city's streets -- which was compounded by the fact that Western magazines were scarce and films from the West also took a little time in arriving. It was said that the mafias used to study The Godfather I, II and III for lessons in style and criminal deportment. And though I, for one, think this a foul canard, it's true that for a while Moscow's "wise guys" did tend to wear leather and a lot of gold jewelry, like wannabe "made men" from an old Martin Scorsese picture, or else black shirts and fedoras, along the lines of a road-show production of Guys and Dolls.


As for the Dolls, well, they favored, by and large, power shoulders, short skirts and plunging necklines: a Donna Karan or a Norma Kamali look that had faded in the West quite a while before. It was one of the ironies of life here that the hookers were the only women who could afford decent clothes from the West. So (rather in the spirit of Schopenhauer's "All art aspires to the condition of music") all fashion aspired for a time to the condition of offering your body for immediate sale. This still continues, though the price-tag is presumably higher -- you now have to buy all the Versaces and the Gucci bags that go along with the body.


All of which, of course, is deeply sexist. But then sexism is alive and well and living in Russia -- like so much of the West's past. I almost expect to see Eskimo Pies and Popsicles and Twinkies for sale here -- now that the West, with its work-out, fizzy-water, stay-away, Kate-Moss lifestyle, has no further need of them.


Perhaps they -- after consideration -- won't come. But practically everything else from what seems like long ago already has: gas-guzzling cars, sex shops, simple-minded advertising, pyramid schemes, dormitory suburbs and the Upwardly (in capital letters) Mobile. I'm not sure what decade we're living in now here, but I'm sure it's one I've lived through already. Even the Versaces are last year's -- and they're not even being sold at sale price. It's like the old joke about why God invented goys -- because somebody had to buy retail. The Russians -- much to the delight of Western retailers -- buy old Western stuff at the original price.


You'd think, somewhere in all this, that someone would cotton on, and do knock-off, High-Street copies of the Paris and Milan shoes, for example, like they do in the West -- bring us all up to date. But I guess there's too much money to be made out of the '70s and '80s. We might have to wait for the '90s for a long time yet.