sine lucro friget ludus

A sheep in the role of Cordelia in “King Lear With Sheep.”Credit” Nick Morris.

tags via @maidenvault

via @bosooka

Right so the thing nobody mentions about the squatting-Slav-in-Adidas thing is that it's a 1980 Moscow Olympics artifact — Adidas got the contract to outfit the Soviet team (this over the howling objections of basically everyone in West Germany, Dassler having to explain to journalists that no, supplying tracksuits to Brezhnev's athletes was not the same as collaboration, it was commerce, which is a distinction the Cold War kept making everyone perform), and what this meant materially was that for the first time you had genuine Western-branded sportswear flooding into the Eastern Bloc through official channels — not bootleg, not smuggled, not the gray-market Levi's that Hungarian tourists were bringing back from Vienna, but the real thing with the trefoil and everything, distributed to athletes and their families and their coaches and from there into the broader population through the usual mechanisms (bribery, theft, the cousin who knew a guy at the sports ministry).

And the timing matters because this is also when the Eastern European economies are starting to seriously decompose — the '80s in the Bloc is just relentless shortage, the joke about the Polish butcher shops with nothing but vinegar isn't really a joke, it's reportage — so a tracksuit, ANY tracksuit but especially a Western one, becomes a multi-purpose garment in a way that's hard to reconstruct from the other side of consumer abundance. It's pajamas, it's leisurewear, it's what you wear to the market, it's what you wear to drink with your buddies, it's what you wear to do informal labor in the courtyard, it's what your dad wears for the entire weekend. The category distinction between "athletic apparel" and "regular clothes" that Western consumers maintained (you don't wear sweatpants to dinner) just doesn't exist, partly because the economic conditions don't support that level of wardrobe specialization and partly because the tracksuit is a prestige item, you'd be insane to wear it only for sports.

Then 1989 happens and the whole thing accelerates rather than ending — because now you've got the simultaneous collapse of state retail and the flooding-in of cheap counterfeit Adidas from Turkey and later China, so the aesthetic of the tracksuit detaches completely from the brand and becomes its own visual language, three stripes on absolutely anything, and it carries the connotations of the late-Soviet period (which for a lot of people are now nostalgic, this is the period before everything got worse) into the post-Soviet hellscape (the gangster aesthetic of the '90s, where the tracksuit becomes literally the uniform of organized crime, partly because you could fight in it and partly because it signaled a refusal of bourgeois Western dress codes that the new oligarchs were busy adopting).

Which is why the Western reading of the squatting-Slav image is always slightly off — it gets read as "poor people in cheap clothes," and there's truth in that, but the actual semiotic content is closer to "this is what victory looked like in 1980 and what survival looked like in 1992 and at this point my dad is just going to wear it forever because what else would he wear, a suit?" Fifty years of a specific sequence of geopolitical and economic events produced an entire aesthetic register the people inhabiting it can't really see anymore because it's just clothes.

*Matt Fraction's Hawkeye Comics has "The Tracksuit Mafia" depicted as Russian Heavies in athletic wear in NYC.