The Measures Taken

Stepanova worked for a year at a textile-printing factory, and the designs from this period are notably made suitable for mass production, based as they are on repeated patterns, and their most obvious impression is one of constant movement. The designs are very strictly geometric, using for the most part only triangles, rectangles and circles, precise and mechanical. Though in a sense they hark back to peasant costume, many of them are virulent examples of the man-machine aesthetic. One design transforms the body into an electrically charged object, covering it with an effect mid-way between cardiogram and op-art. A line of squares, a line below of horizontal stripes, below another line of squares, with sharp-angled lines careering along the pattern. The garment as showcase for the body's fleshy depressions and bumps is totally abolished- the design suggests the wearer electrify itself- become electricity itself, perhaps in reference to Lenin's then-current slogan 'Socialism = Soviet Power + Electrification'.