The History of GUM: Why Fashion Shows Began After the Store Opened

GUM’s Demonstration Hall on Red Square, on the third floor of its first arcade, has served several different audiences. Before the revolution, it hosted shareholders’ meetings and concerts. In the 1930s, it served as a private club; after the building returned to retail use, it became a venue for fashion shows. The store opened to the public in December 1953, but regular fashion shows in the hall did not begin until September 1954. The distinction between these dates matters: the renovation prepared the space, while staff in the new Fashion Department created the public programme.

Archival documents distinguish three ways a designer’s idea reached the public: a presentation in the hall, a pattern for making the garment at home, and a garment produced by a factory. These appeared at different times and were available to different people. The hall’s changing uses are described in the history of the hall on GUM’s website, while details of the hall’s layout in 1953 are provided by a Moscow historical and cultural heritage assessment.

What was the hall used for before fashion shows?

Before 1953, the room had no single, unchanging purpose. In the state historical and cultural heritage assessment the third-floor hall is identified as the former shareholders’ meeting room of the Upper Trading Rows. GUM’s official website adds that concerts were held there before the revolution. These accounts describe different uses of the same space and caution against applying the later name ‘Demonstration Hall’ to the entire pre-revolutionary period.

GUM closed as a department store in 1930, and government offices took over its premises. According to GUM’s account, the first arcade became a restricted area, while the hall served as a club for party circles in the 1930s. Music and film screenings returned, but the events were now for a select audience. GUM’s historical account confirms this broad change in the building’s fortunes. It does not suggest that every room stood empty: some retail activity continued, although the department store had ceased to operate in its former form.

The shift from a private club to a public show with paid admission changed who could attend: a shopper could buy a ticket, whereas the 1930s club was intended for a limited audience. GUM’s official history records both uses of the hall but does not establish how many people attended the earlier events.

What changed during the 1953 renovation?

In 1953, the state restored the building’s role as a major store and refitted its premises. A Moscow historical and cultural heritage assessment states that Soviet Minister of Trade Anastas Mikoyan personally oversaw the work, architect B. A. Sobolevsky designed the renovation, and Metrostroy carried out the construction. The same document says that the former third-floor shareholders’ meeting room was adapted as a demonstration hall. The assessment records the specific allocation of functions across the floors, rather than an abstract ‘revival’.

According to the assessment, construction work finished on 15 October 1953. Until 20 December, staff fitted out the retail departments, brought in goods and dressed the windows. A food hall occupied the first arcade along Red Square, other departments took the lower floors, and the hall intended for future shows was upstairs. Grigory Revzin, in his history of GUM gives 24 December 1953 as the date the department store opened to the public. Neither the completion of construction nor the start of trading establishes that fashion shows began that same day.

According to the historical and cultural heritage assessment, GUM’s renovation included replacing the entrance doors, adding a granite plinth around the building and installing a new fountain in place of the old one. Artists from the Riga Decorative Arts Combine dressed the windows in the lead-up to 20 December 1953. These details show the scale of the building’s refurbishment, but the assessment does not describe how the hall itself was finished after its conversion.

According to the Moscow assessment, retail departments occupied the ground, first and mezzanine floors, while the demonstration hall and administrative offices were on the second floor. Performances took place in a separate hall with audience seating inside the operating department store.

When did the hall actually open to audiences?

Regular shows in GUM’s Demonstration Hall began in September 1954. Historian Sergei Zhuravlev and sociologist Jukka Gronow give this date in their book ‘Fashion by Plan’, drawing on the department store’s own archives. Thus, saying that ‘the hall opened after the 1953 renovation’ is accurate as a broad description of the period, but not as a precise chronology of its first season of shows.

GUM’s Fashion Department was taking shape in 1954. Its staff designed clothes, made samples in a sewing workshop, published albums and staged presentations. The department and the hall were connected but distinct: the stage presented the work of fashion designers, pattern makers, tailors, art historians and staff responsible for presenting the collections. As Zhuravlev and Gronow established, models, announcers, musicians and an administrator were also assigned to the hall.

The researchers recount how fashion designer Lidia Averyanova, recruited from another Moscow department store, was given the key to the future hall and set about preparing it. This episode was recorded from her own account many decades later, so it is best understood as a participant’s recollection rather than documentary evidence of the official opening date. The archival evidence that shows began in September 1954 has a different evidential standing.

Who prepared the collections and the stage

The Fashion Department had several distinct work areas. Designers and pattern makers worked in separate rooms, samples were sewn in a workshop, a publishing team prepared materials for distribution, and models and announcers appeared before audiences to orchestral music. The department employed around 70 people in 1954–1955; by the summer of 1958, it had around 80, including seven fashion designers and fifteen women who took part in the shows. These figures from archival records show why staging a fashion show involved considerably more work than that of a single presenter at a microphone.

Lidia Averyanova came from the Shcherbakovsky department store and became one of the leading designers of women’s clothing. Evgenia Istomina moved from GUM’s atelier, while Elena Tomashevich had experience in bespoke dressmaking; their designs featured in the department’s early collections. Vera Gurtovaya, who also came from the Shcherbakovsky department store, later ran the Demonstration Hall itself. The authors of ‘Fashion by Plan’ reconstruct their biographies from documents and interviews.

The first head of GUM’s Fashion Department was Naum Katz, who had previously worked at TsUM. According to the researchers, he held the post for about ten years.

The atelier took individual orders and made clothes for specific clients; the Fashion Department prepared samples and collections for presentation, published patterns and sought ways to bring designs into mass production. The two worked together, though the minutes studied by Zhuravlev and Gronow suggest that their collaboration was not always smooth. This distinction explains why a dress that caught a spectator’s eye did not automatically become a ready-made purchase at the till.

What happened at a show, and what did the audience take away?

A show was both a performance and an explanation of the clothes. According to Zhuravlev and Gronow’s research, models walked out to live music, while an announcer named each garment’s designer and described its style, purpose, construction and fabric. Art specialists prepared the introductions and commentary. Visitors could see a dress in motion and learn what it was made of and when it was intended to be worn.

Tickets were sold at the entrance. GUM’s official history of the hall gives the ticket price as five roubles in the year the hall opened and 50 kopecks after the 1961 currency reform. These figures belong to different periods; it would be misleading to treat them as a straightforward reduction in price. Even so, a paid ticket was fundamentally different from an invitation to a private club: according to GUM, any ordinary shopper could buy one.

At first, there was one fashion show a day. The hall held up to 350 spectators; from the late 1950s, two or three shows were held each day instead of one. The figure of ‘up to a thousand people a day’ on GUM’s website should be understood as the potential audience across several full shows, rather than a confirmed daily attendance figure sustained over decades.

A photograph of a fashion show in the early 1960s, published in Zhuravlev and Gronov’s monograph, shows spectators seated in a separate hall as a model steps onto the runway. The image shows how the event was staged, but cannot tell us whether anyone in the audience bought the garment on display.

The start of each fashion show was also announced over the department store’s public address system. This was an important part of the format’s openness: people could attend without a prior invitation, even if they had only heard about the show while shopping at GUM. There were practical limits, however: the number of seats and the ticket price. Shoppers had to go up to the third floor and enter a separate hall; the shows did not run continuously in a public shopping arcade.

According to Zhuravlev and Gronov, citing Fashion Department records, a GUM fashion show was filmed for Soviet television for the first time in 1960. The authors give no figures for the television audience or attendance at the hall on the day of filming.

Was the hall equally accessible to everyone?

A paid ticket allowed entry without a special invitation, but some of the hall’s time and audience were still reserved for private events. Zhuravlev and Gronov cite an archival report: around 29,000 people visited the hall in its first ten months, of whom roughly 10,000 were ordinary shoppers. The rest were members of Soviet and foreign delegations, who attended free of charge. Invited groups therefore accounted for about two thirds of the audience during that period, although any shopper could already buy a ticket. The archival figures cited in the study clarify what ‘public’ meant: entry was no longer an exclusive privilege, but the audience was not made up solely of local people who had come of their own accord.

Besides public shows, the hall hosted fittings, staff meetings and private previews of new collections. According to the researchers, these previews could take place before the collections were shown to the public and were intended for retail executives or invited guests. The hall’s history was therefore more complex than a simple shift from ‘closed’ to ‘open’: after 1954, both types of event shared the same venue.

The House of Fashion at 14 Kuznetsky Most also designed and displayed clothing. A Moscow assessment of its building dates the institution’s move to this address to the mid-1940s. GUM offered another venue, located inside the department store itself and accessible to shoppers during a visit.

How did the runway connect with clothes people could actually wear?

Seeing an outfit at GUM did not mean an identical one was immediately available on the shelves. According to the study Fashion by Plan, the department created seasonal collections, sent specifications to clothing factories for small production runs, and published albums, sketches and patterns. Customers could buy a printed pattern and sew the garment themselves or take it to a dressmaker to order. The Demonstration Hall connected designers’ ideas with shoppers’ choices.

How did GUM differ from the House of Fashion on Kuznetsky Most?

The All-Union House of Fashion and GUM’s Fashion Department had overlapping responsibilities, but belonged to different administrative systems. The Moscow institution on Kuznetsky Most began operating in September 1944. Sources differ on when it acquired all-Union status: an annotation of archival material in the Russian State Library of Arts catalogue gives 1947 (while its subject heading gives 1948), whereas Zhuravlev and Gronov — 1949. By 1954, the House of Fashion was operating within the clothing industry; GUM’s Fashion Department was established within a retail business. Kuznetsky Most developed designs for industrial production, while at GUM the show formed part of the shopping experience.

GUM’s official history describes the All-Union House of Fashion as the former main venue for displaying clothing. Zhuravlev and Gronov’s book adds that GUM’s shows combined admission for shoppers with live music and commentary on the garments. This comparison concerns the mid-20th-century formats described by the authors. It does not establish that the earlier venue never admitted spectators or that every fashion show in Moscow took place at GUM.

According to the same monograph, GUM’s Fashion Department created seasonal collections of around 100–150 women’s wear designs; it also worked separately on men’s clothing, footwear and hats. At the shows, these pieces formed a complete look rather than serving as incidental accessories. Audiences could thus see several strands of the department’s work at once, although women’s dresses and suits soon became the focus of the programme.

Who was GUM’s fashion designed for?

Designers could make a sample for the runway before a factory had produced a batch and the store had received it for sale. Zhuravlev and Gronov describe GUM’s arrangements with manufacturers for small production runs, but a show did not in itself guarantee that every design would be available at the counter. Buying a pattern gave shoppers another way to recreate a style they had seen.

A debate about the purpose of the collections arose almost immediately within the Fashion Department. At a meeting of GUM’s Party Committee on 19 July 1955, whose minutes are examined by Zhuravlev and Gronov, staff discussed the first designs they had seen: which garments could be worn every day, and which existed chiefly to make a striking impression on the runway. Party Committee secretary M. I. Sulimenko insisted on taking customer demand, comfort and price into account; designer R. A. Zinger also defended bolder, more elegant designs.

In 1955, Fashion Department head Naum Kats proposed a practical compromise: new designs should combine elegance with simple construction and be suitable for making from Soviet-produced materials. GUM director V. G. Kamenev pointed to a limit on production: the department store did not have the capacity of a large clothing manufacturer and had to rely chiefly on local firms. Gosplan had not allocated the department a separate supply of scarce fabrics for small production runs. The debate over beauty and comfort was therefore also a debate over who could make the garments shown in the hall, and what materials they could use.

By the early 1960s, documents show a shift towards practical clothes for everyday life, although the designers continued to debate the place of formal and fashion-forward pieces. An archival report from 1966, cited in the monograph, explicitly linked the development of comfortable designs to widely available fabrics. Even a purchased pattern was of little use to someone sewing at home if they could not buy the required material.

How designs travelled beyond the hall

Publication began almost alongside the shows. As early as 1954, GUM designs appeared in the magazine Soviet Woman, while patterns appeared in a supplement to Rabotnitsa. From late 1955, the Fashion Department began publishing its own albums, GUM New Arrivals and GUM Fashions. Print could do what a 350-seat hall could not: give someone in another city an illustration of a design and a cutting pattern without a trip to Red Square.

They were distributed through shops, postal subscriptions and a network of department stores. According to tables Zhuravlev and Gronov compiled from departmental reports, five albums were published in 1956, with a combined print run of around 230,000 copies. Around 1.148 million separate pattern booklets were printed that year, nearly five times as many. These were different types of publication, and their print runs cannot be added together to give a count of unique readers: one person might buy several issues, and a copy printed was not necessarily a pattern used.

Letters to the department also showed consumer interest. The researchers cite correspondence from people in the regions who asked about new designs and explained that they used GUM patterns to sew for their families. According to archival records, the combined print run of albums with cutting patterns rose from 150,000 copies in 1962 to 381,000 in 1963. These figures do not prove that every show was a success, but they do show that the designs reached people beyond the hall.

The completed looks were photographed for a series called Models of the Season. From 1963, visitors were offered brochures for individual seasonal collections; sketches could be bought as a set or separately. These publications turned the impression left by a show into practical information about a garment’s design. The sources do not establish that every design shown subsequently went into mass production.

The Fashion Department published general seasonal catalogues and selections for young people, children and fuller-figured women, as well as material on sportswear and knitwear. Illustrations, photographs and patterns conveyed each design’s shape, details and cut in print.

Why a popular design did not always go on sale

A fashion show, a catalogue and a mass-produced garment each had a different production timetable. In December 1966, GUM set up a small technical team of five to prepare documentation and duplicate samples for clothing factories. The department store hoped to order limited runs of designs that customers liked and sell them through its own departments. This process is described in an archival study: bringing a design from catwalk to shop counter required an additional production step.

Special viewings for factories show where approval of a design ended and selection for production began. From spring 1967, the Fashion Department presented samples to manufacturers in the Demonstration Hall twice a year. On 20 October 1967, according to documents published by Zhuravlev and Gronow, four Moscow factories selected 15 of the 50 designs shown; even fewer reached production. This viewing should not be confused with an ordinary show for shoppers: the audience consisted of factory representatives assessing each design’s construction and suitability for mass production.

The annual figures make the distinction clearer. In 1967, 13 clothing designs and 11 footwear designs from the Fashion Department were adopted for production. The Chaika and Moskvichka factories planned to make 6,356 women’s garments based on GUM designs, but GUM ordered 1,100 for its own departments and actually received 596. The rest of the planned production was intended for other Moscow shops; planned output, GUM’s order and deliveries to its counters were three different figures. The number of styles on the catwalk therefore cannot be equated with the department store’s range.

Footwear followed a different path: in the first half of 1967, factories accepted 11 shoe designs and seven lasts developed at GUM for production. Later, the Moscow factory Zarya and the Yerevan factory Nairi worked with the Fashion Department. Researchers attribute this relative success to the fact that shoe factories had fewer designs of their own, while large clothing factories already received designs from the All-Union House of Fashion Design and had experimental workshops. The difference between dresses and shoes lay in how they were produced, rather than in the impact of their presentation.

In practice, this step often stalled. Records of discussions in 1968 show that factories declined to take on some of the best designs, despite their approval by audiences in the hall: the garments required too much labour or did not suit the available fabrics or production facilities. Z. T. Melnikova, head of the technical team, asked the designers to create part of the collection specifically for factories. D. B. Shimilis, who oversaw the department’s artistic work, feared that a simplified factory version would distort the design shown on the catwalk.

At the same discussion, Lidiya Averyanova drew another distinction: a striking design for someone willing to make a garment herself or have it made at a dressmaker’s, and a style produced for the mass market, called for different approaches. The disagreement cannot be reduced to a shortage of fabric or one side’s taste. A catwalk sample, a pattern for home sewing and a factory production run served different customers. The technical team was disbanded in the early 1970s: it had not established a reliable way to bring the best collections into mass production.

Audience approval did not automatically mean an order for a factory. A visitor could buy a pattern, commission a garment from a dressmaker’s or find certain designs on sale later. Archival records of negotiations with factories show that agreeing on construction and materials remained a separate task even after a successful show.

Why did interest in the shows change?

By the early 1970s, attendance at GUM’s Demonstration Hall had fallen. Archival documents studied by Sergei Zhuravlev and Jukka Gronow link the decline to repeated collections, touring shows featuring the best designs and the condition of the hall. This was the department staff’s explanation and should be checked against attendance reports.

At a meeting on 15 January 1963, designer R. A. Zinger complained that the creators of the collections were paying less attention to audience reactions in the hall; management later even required designers to attend shows featuring their own work. This was the assessment of someone involved in the department and cannot be applied to the hall’s entire programme.

Touring shows affected what could be presented in the hall. The Fashion Department prepared its first full collection for an overseas tour around 1958–1959, and created three such collections in 1966. The authors of a monograph based on archival documents note: the best designs, fabrics and some experienced staff were sent on tour, while the daily Moscow programme sometimes lacked new garments and models to present them.

In a speech on 27 December 1972, the hall’s manager, Vera Gurtovaya, listed observable problems rather than aesthetic preferences: spectators came in after the show had started, musicians appeared during the introduction, and the models’ movements did not always match the narrator’s commentary. Historians present her remarks as an internal critique; a single account cannot reconstruct every show. Taken together with attendance reports, it shows that the quality of organisation had become a problem in its own right, beyond the hall’s physical deterioration.

What the attendance reports show

The annual reports counted audiences beyond the permanent hall. For 1959, the Fashion Department reported 500,000 spectators, including those at touring shows across the USSR and abroad. That total cannot be compared with the 83,100 visitors to the hall on Red Square in 1973: the latter figure covers only the permanent venue.

Around the turn of the 1970s, the Demonstration Hall held about 620 public shows a year. With a maximum capacity of 350 seats, it could theoretically have accommodated more than 200,000 spectators. But assuming a full house for every show is different from counting actual attendance: researchers found about 100,500 visits in 1972 and 83,100 in 1973. The decline is documented for these two reporting years specifically.

Historians also cite the financial figures: ticket revenue was 55,600 roubles in 1971, 40,300 in 1973 and 34,200 in 1974. These figures do not account for every expense or replace an assessment of the programme’s artistic quality, but they confirm that the decline had financial consequences. Partial repairs to the hall began only in 1974, after staff complained about its condition.

Reports studied by Zhuravlev and Gronow record considerable demand for shows by companies from East Germany and Czechoslovakia in the early 1970s. Compared with attendance at regular shows, this suggests that audiences responded to the novelty of the collections; the documents cannot reveal each spectator’s personal reasons for attending.

What remains of this history in GUM today?

On GUM’s official page, checked on 2 October 2026, the Demonstration Hall is described as a venue for fashion shows, exhibitions, concerts and other events on the third floor of the first arcade. Its area is given as 365 square metres. This confirms that the hall exists as an event space, but does not establish that visitors can enter freely on any given day or see daily historical fashion shows.

Visitors to GUM may find it helpful to distinguish three stages in the building’s history. The architecture of the Upper Trading Rows belongs to the late nineteenth-century project; the official use of the first arcade and its private club belong to the period after the department store closed; the store open to the public and its fashion shows date from the alterations of 1953–1954. These uses shared the same space, but its purpose and access rules changed over time.

Later fashion shows at GUM did not necessarily take place in the historic hall. For example, the store’s official chronicle describes a Moscow Fashion Week event on 20 June 2022: for one evening, the department store’s arcades and floors became a catwalk, with more than a hundred models presenting the collections. This one-off event offers a useful comparison of the spaces: spectators watched the show in the public galleries, whereas in the 1950s they bought a ticket and entered a separate hall. The 2022 show does not establish that the daily programme of the mid-twentieth century has survived.

The hall’s official listing, checked on 2 October 2026, describes the types of events it hosts and its modern equipment: a video projector, a 3.5 × 4.5 metre screen and ten speakers. It says nothing about how much of the interior survived the 1953 reconstruction. The current page therefore cannot establish which features visitors saw at the first shows; that would require a survey or historical photographs.

How does the hall’s history change our understanding of GUM?

The decisive change went beyond the return of retail. First, the state altered the premises and reopened the department store on 24 December 1953. Then, from September 1954, Fashion Department staff began presenting clothing to audiences. The former meeting hall and private club became a place where shoppers could see a designer’s ideas and hear a specialist explain them. The early audience also included organised delegations, while later interest in the shows depended on the quality of the programme. Thus the history of a single room adds precision to the familiar date of GUM’s ‘opening’: it differs for the store and the fashion hall.

For those interested in exploring GUM in the context of Red Square, the tour itinerary ‘Heart of the Capital’ includes a visit to the department store. Other private tours offered by the bureau are listed on the homepage. The tour does not include guaranteed access to the Demonstration Hall.

Sources

1. GUM — Demonstration Hall
2. GUM — The History of GUM
3. Moscow Government — State Historical and Cultural Expert Assessment Report, Upper Trading Rows
4. Sergei Zhuravlev, Jukka Gronow — ‘Fashion According to Plan’, Institute of Russian History, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2013
5. Moscow Government — historical and cultural expert assessment report on the All-Union House of Fashion Models building
6. Radius — ‘Heart of the Capital’ tour
7. Radius — private tours
8. GUM — Moscow Fashion Week: the GRAND fashion show on 20 June 2022
9. Russian State Library of Arts — catalogue of Russian State Archive of the Economy materials on the House of Fashion Models on Kuznetsky Most