I was born in the 90s, which means yes, I've seen the videos of the Berlin wall coming down,

I've seen the pictures of Soviet style apartment complexes, but those to me are all relics.

Like it's hard for me to actually picture life behind the Iron Curtain.

I think for lack of imagination I just imagine it in black and white, something akin to

Kansas before Dorothy goes over the rainbow.

The way I imagined it was more like a grey socialist environment where nothing interesting happened.

This is how people of my generation imagine this time, even in countries that were behind the Iron Curtain.

My name is Dula Muzković, I'm based in Budapest and I'm an artist and curator and researcher.

One of the topics I'm researching is avant-garde fashion in Eastern Europe.

Eastern block fashion.

Again, I think for lack of imagination, I imagine babushka's and Kirchiffs,

or maybe the strapping young proletariat in a khaki work shirt,

or perhaps in the 70s and 80s like bleached out track suits and severe shaved heads.

This generation is presented as a ruthless generation.

The ruthless, you mean like the vision that we had where everything was like grey and dark and boring?

Exactly this.

Dula also thought that Eastern fashion was supposed to be severe and ruthless also,

until he came across a picture of a party, a party that took place in his city in Budapest in the 80s.

People were wearing, for example, cocktail dresses made out of cocktails,

from which you could literally drink the colorful drinks, or there was a fruit dress, there was a cake dress.

These outfits were outlandish, they were decadent.

What I saw really resembled things that you could only imagine at that time in places like London or New York.

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