The factory-based designers also found time to teach and their pedagogic role helped set them apart from capitalism. For example, they educated a new front of young designers at design schools like the Higher Technical Institute of Moscow. With a new generation came new ideas. By 1928, students were moving in more symbolic and representational design directions. This was an intentional divergence from what they saw as lefty avant-garde concerns with universality, something which was not in service to proletariat needs. Textiles were seen as a ready vehicle for the political rhetoric of the young Socialist in a manner similar to graphic design and other forms for agitprop. Unlike Stepanova, Popova, and Rozanova, younger designers were convinced that a particularly Soviet-themed visual language could and should be developed. The students began promoting thematic graphics that would edify, refashion, and support the proletariat in becoming the ideal Soviet citizen. [19] The values of nationalism, communality, industrialization, modernization, and youthful vigor were expressed in their proposed motifs exemplified by hammer and sickle, laborers, gears, smoke stacks, and bicycles.

This approach to propaganda (agitaciony) [20] through textile was publicly promoted for the first time in October, 1928 by a group of artists from both within the school and unaffiliated. The exhibition Soviet Textiles for Daily Life, took place at the Moscow institute, and was a significant display of textile work by both generations. The event was timed to coincide with the beginning of Stalin’s first compulsory industrialization initiative known as the Five-Year Plan. Exhibitors included textile factories and their designers, sales agents, schools, students, and working faculty members such as Stepanova and Maiakovskaia. Over fifty of the institute’s textile students exhibited, most of who were women comprising one third weaving students and two thirds in printed fabrics. [21]

The exhibition was intended as a launch pad for envisioning and enacting increased textile productivity in order to meet the expectation of the Five-Year Plan, while also jolting production in response to major fabric shortages up to that point. The organizers of the exhibition held hope that the event would inspire the establishment of a consolidated (or central) national design house as an arm of the All-Union Textile Syndicate (an affiliation of factories and an administrative body). In their minds, this would reduce the inefficiency of each factory’s design studio producing artwork for approval and the related lag in demand-to-market response. All design work could be centralized and handled by one national studio, thus also eliminating the need for dependence on French design books and hence foreign influence. [22]

The Textile Syndicate had been founded in 1922 primarily to handle the major concerns of the newly revived, post-civil war industry. For example, production capacity and overall operation of textile factories had been depleted by over two thirds between World War I and the end of the Russian Civil War (1914-1922). And alarmingly, from 1922-1923 most textiles had no designs on them at all. [23] It was not until the later part of the 20s that production began to increase. [24] It was the Syndicate’s primary purpose to address these shortfalls. It was also responsible for assessing factors that would enable increased importation of raw materials like wool and cotton in order to increase fabric production and also to develop export to many Central Asian countries.

Upon graduation, some print textile design students began working in the factory studios. What followed was a period of both experimentation and productivity, though in reality production of the new thematic designs was very low due to unpopularity. Many of the newly arrived designers were not satisfied with the role that the individual factory studios played in determining what was and wasn't produced for national consumption. They still wanted the structural changes they had envisioned while at school. They argued that the older generation designers were politically regressive and at times lacking in skill hence, they did not have the capacity to realize the designs necessary for the new Soviet citizen. Many associated the purely geometric designs with leftist deviance. [25] However, members of the Textile Syndicate were concerned that their centralization proposal did not take into consideration quality control issues of design in relation to cloth, appropriate fabric distribution for distinct geographic and cultural regions, and consumer taste. [26] Art historian and critic, A.A. Fyodorov-Davidov introduces the First Art Exhibition of Soviet Domestic Textiles, in Moscow, 1928 with the following excerpted (and ethnocentric) address:

Among the various applied arts, textile design is one of the most important. As a basic commodity, millions of metres of textiles are produced every year for use in all parts of our country, finding their way even to remote areas populated chiefly by bears, to the homes of the most backward of peoples. One of the basic commodities for trade between town and country, textiles are among the first objects from the new culture to reach the backward, outlying areas. […] From this it is evident that textile design has an enormous part to play in changing old tastes, in breaking old aesthetic traditions and habits (along with the ideological ones that are so bound up in them); it is a vehicle for the new culture and the new ideology.[…] The potential of textiles for popular propaganda has long been recognized […] But it is far too crude and naïve a ploy to use textiles merely as bearers of printed pictures, a practice which, unforunately, continues in this country to this day[…][27]