Woohooo!!! The dress I’ve been waiting so long for finally arrived in the mail! 😍

It came from one of my favorite Etsy shops based in Ukraine that specializes in vintage USSR items, that I mentioned in my last post. When I first saw this lovely dress (I’ve been wanting a brown dress for a really long time, especially for fall), I was amazed to find out it was a 1980’s-era school uniform. All that was missing from it was the white apron and collar/cuffs, but the foundation of the uniform dress remained! And it’s in great shape, to boot!!! ❤️

I’ve always thought Soviet school uniforms were so cute! I found a great photo on Google for reference:

I’ve been fascinated (okay, obsessed) with The Cold War/US and USSR relations/the Eastern Bloc/the collapse of the Soviet Union since I was really young. I have no idea how or when it started; it’s just always been an interest of mine, it seems! So the dress is an absolute gem in my eyes, since it encapsulates both my passion for fashion and history.

Check out the old tags on the inside of the dress, written in Ukrainian:

It makes me wonder what student(s) previously owned this 30+ years ago. If only a dress could talk! And then I think of how awe-inspiring it is that it made its way to me from so far away. I’ll definitely take good care of it and I’m so happy it found a new home with me! ❤️

Lastly, my current read (because it goes sooooooo well with the content of this post and you already know I’m a history nerd), Perestroika by Mikhail Gorbachev (the former president of the Soviet Union).

I’ve been wanting to read this book, written in 1987 (the year I was born, haha), to see how Gorbachev intended to restructure and reform the USSR, which ultimately collapsed in 1991. Had the Soviet Union not fallen apart, would his reform policies have worked in the long run? We’ll never know…but now I have a piece of this collapsed, now non-existent part of history, in the form of a dress. In a lot of ways, I think the dress found me.

See ya!!! ❤️