The hammer and sickle have made a stellar return to the fashion world in the form of a voluminous red hoodie, adorned with the Soviet symbol and worn by Kim Kardashian.

Setting aside the irony that two weeks earlier her husband had cosied up to the US president-elect, Donald Trump – one of the world’s most staunch capitalists whose relationship with Russia has been under intense scrutiny this week – Kardashian’s fashion choice raises some ethical questions about appropriating communist symbols.

Until recently the only communist souvenirs you would see in Russia were cheap T-shirts in kiosks marketed at ignorant tourists. Now the Paris-based label Vetements sells its limited edition hoodies for $700 a piece.

Originally, the hammer was used to represent the industrial labourers of Soviet times; the sickle the peasant farmers – but not any more.

stuart (@jungleplatoon) Let's play a game.



If anyone finds something that's more ironic than Kim Kardashian wearing a $770 communist hoodie, they win the Internet. pic.twitter.com/r3tovwSFVE

It’s not the first time communism has become a fashion obsession. In the mid-2000s Moscow-based fashion designer Denis Simachev gained notoriety for combining Soviet military badges with fur, gold flowers and Russian cartoon characters.



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It caused outrage among a generation of Russians who felt that at best their past was being mocked and depreciated and at worst, the dark legacy of the Soviet regime was being celebrated.

Ten years later we are here again, but this time the audience is different. Vetements, whose head designer, Demna Gvasalia (also the artistic director at Balenciaga), was born in Soviet Georgia, has been successful because it has tapped into a zeitgeist of a generation that grew up in the shadow of the Soviet era, but never experienced it directly themselves.

Russian designer Gosha Rubchinskiy has been another force in reintroducing Russian and Soviet symbols in to global visual culture

His spring/summer collection 2016, called 1984, also uses Soviet fonts and slogans, as well as the hammer and sickle.

For the generation, born in the early 2000s, the hammer and sickle is seen as a curious relic of the past, but to many it still represents a political and cultural struggle.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Gosha Rubchinskiy’s 1984 collection. Photograph: Calvert Journal

Georgia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Ukraine have all banned symbols of “totalitarian and criminal ideology”, and the public display of the hammer and sickle, the red star and other communist symbols is a criminal offence.

Ukraine, whose struggle for identity and independence is particularly poignant, is going through the process of dismantling the legacies of the communist state, removing Soviet-era monuments and renaming public places.

When the decommunisation laws were approved in Ukraine in April 2015, 22 cities and 44 villages had to be renamed and gaping holes where monuments used to stand demonstrated the former ubiquity of communist symbols.

As a Russian, I am bored with people bringing up communism: it’s an old stereotype people are happy to advertise on their clothes without any real understanding of its history.

Even if you can spare $700 for a hammer and sickle hoodie, it’s worth thinking about the message it is sending.

A version of this article first appeared on the Calvert Journal, a guide to the new east