In the 1920s a number of Modernist designers, artists and architects set out to devise an appropriate dress for the new era in which they were living. Some male architects thought that the traditional tailored suit, particularly the English suit, expressed the very principles of simplicity, standardisation and lack of ornament that also applied to contemporary architecture. Others, like the spiritually oriented Bauhaus teacher Johannes Itten, adopted a kind of monastic robe. There was, however, a category of dress that evoked the idea of the factory and identified the wearer as a worker or technocrat. It was based on either the technician’s jacket or, more commonly, the boiler suit or overall.
 
Rodchenko’s single-piece overall was made by his wife Varvara Stepanova, and shortly afterwards she published an article in which she described it as ‘prozodezhda’ or production clothing. It presented Rodchenko as a worker, dressed in an everyday garment that would in theory be familiar to many and would suggest the forward-looking, technological agenda of Modernism. As a workers’ uniform, it also suggested the collective nature of Soviet society.

The garment was made of stiff wool. This suited the climate of the Soviet Union but also the design, in which the pattern pieces were geometric in form rather than close fitting. All the edges that would get wear were trimmed in leather.

The design was an experimental one and, like so many Soviet designs, was never put into production, owing to the lack of resources in the difficult economic circumstances of the post-revolutionary period.