Maria Alesina (Universiteit Gent)
The pre-revolutionary Russian fashion press remains a field neglected by scholars and thus marked by two persistent stereotypes: the assumed triviality of the content of such magazines and the idea that they were created and developed by a couple of well-known male publishers. In my lecture, I want to present the counterarguments to both of these assumptions. After a brief overview of a 90-years-long history of women editing fashion magazines in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I will zoom onto the particular case of Modnyi magazin (1862-1883) that was published and edited by Sofia Rekhnevskaia-Mei. Firstly, I will cover the contribution of this magazine and its editor to the development of the Russian fashion press and its transnational connections. Secondly, I will focus on Modnyi magazin’s agenda on promoting the so called woman question and demonstrate how Rekhnevskaia-Mei turned her fashion publication into a platform for supporting women’s rights. I will outline a range of emancipation-related issues that were covered in the pages of Modnyi magazin and discuss its particular focus on the pro-women’s philanthropy, which, according to Richard Stites, signified the beginning of feminism in Russia.