Archival Replica of ‘Ignatieff Jeans’ Brand Blue Jeans. 

100% Cotton.

Replica of ‘Ignatieff Jeans’ Brand Blue Jeans.  By the mid 1980s, in an attempt to reverse deep stagnation in the Soviet economy, Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the USSR, introduced a series of reforms both cultural and industrial. Under Gorbachev’s Glasnost, restrictions on foreign and suppressed domestic media were relaxed and the underground economy of foreign commodities and their indigenous simulacra exploded.

Small workshops across the Soviet Socialist Republics attempted to recreate Western styles, creating silkscreens by mixing egg whites with photographic chemicals and creating Western style blue jeans by fortifying and boiling the rough poly-cotton Soviet denim. Beyond straightforward bootlegs of American brand name, several domestic enterprises developed their own logos and commercial identities.

The ‘Imagined West’ of perestroika was not so much a reflection of actual Western Values as a fantasy version of Western value as such. Thus, from 1985 to 1989, the hottest clothing brand in the USSR was ‘Ignatieff Jeans.’ Michael Ignatieff was a popular Canadian academic who, in 1985, published My Russian Album, a memoir exploring his father’s White Russian aristocratic heritage. A bestseller in Soviet Russia, where any contemporary material on Imperial identity was being immediately devoured across the political spectrum of civil society. Ignatieff’s reactionary lineage was tied to his Canadian identity, a country that was seen as progressive, dynamic, and shaping a new world order. Ignatieff Jeans’ combination of White Russian reaction and dynamic Canadianism represented the growing influence of Canadian national culture at the beginning of the end of history.

LMX Unlimited has recreated the most iconic pieces of Ignatieff Jeans, working closely with collectors around the world. The Ignatieff Jeans’ blue jeans recreate the All-Canadian cut and style sought after in the 1987 Soviet Union. 

As history threatens to resurrect itself and the international scene becomes once again chaotic, LMX Unlimited recreates a moment in the history of Canadian nationalism where the triple maple leaf served as a beacon of a peaceable supranational community. Let it once again allow us to dream.