More than a decade into the Cold War, in the fall of 1959, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev made his first visit to the U.S. at the invitation of President Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was one of many political voyages that year as U.S. and Soviet leaders attempted to foster peace and understanding.
During one of those missions, American lifestyle was the focus. Atlanta resident Jacqueline Chester, then a 21-year-old college student from New York, was vaguely aware of political tensions between the U.S. and the Soviet Union when she arrived at Sokolniki Park in Russia's capital city. Chester was a model for the American National Exhibition in Moscow, a seven-week event in the summer of 1959, designed to give Russians an intimate look at American life.
"I knew about the existence of a Cold War, but I didn't fear an actual outbreak," said Chester, who was thrilled to take her first trip out of the country. Her experience is the subject of a community discussion at the Auburn Avenue Research Library. Chester, a playwright, will also read from her upcoming memoirs of the trip.
"I have so many rich memories," said Chester, who traveled and absorbed Russian culture when she wasn't walking the runways. She met many interesting people and returned home with the kind of cultural understanding that seemed to elude a country immersed in segregation. "People [thought] of Russians as being austere, strange people, but I found them very much like everyone else," she said.
Chester said she had limited exposure to racial segregation in American society. But ironically, a flap over segregation threatened to upend the event that launched her modeling career.
As a student at the Fashion Institute of Technology studying apparel design, Chester was approached by a school official with the opportunity of a lifetime. "She asked me, what are you doing this summer," Chester said. "I said I was working in a department store. She said, ‘How would you like to go to Moscow?' I thought she was talking about Moscow, Idaho."
Chester was among the 47 professional and amateur models selected for the Moscow-bound fashion show. The show was one of several installations at the exhibition, which took place on 11 acres of the park. Other attractions included a model American home -- which sparked the Kitchen Debate between Khrushchev and U.S. Vice President, Richard Nixon -- a cosmetics display from makeup maven, Helena Rubinstein and panorama of the American Landscape.
The 35-minute fashion show, produced by Leonard Hankin, vice president of Bergdorf Goodman, featured scenes from American life including a backyard barbecue and a civil wedding ceremony. The fashions included shirtwaist dresses, bathing suits, evening gowns and pants.
But when Hankin previewed the show for 250 American fashion editors assembled in New York, negative publicity threatened to unhinge it before it started. Some editors, appalled by the clothing, the casual format and scenes showing white and black models interacting socially, petitioned the show, with one calling it "an insult to American family life," according to Life magazine.
"We were concerned that they would change the format and we would have to relearn everything," Chester said. But Hankin stuck to his vision, minus some of the integrated scenes, and the show went on.
Chester performed in two fashion shows per day for $200 a week. After the shows, attendees would gather to greet the models. They wanted autographs, invited them to fancy restaurants and clubs, and women sought to buy the models' personal clothing off their backs.
She also met interesting Americans in Russia including Jamaican-born Robert Robinson, who in 1930 accepted a one-year position in Russia as an automotive specialist only to be refused an exit visa until 1974.
"He thought he could return home whenever he wanted to," said Chester who accompanied Robinson on visits to the Bolshoi Theatre.
Chester left the country thinking she would never see Robinson again, but decades later, he appeared on a talk show promoting his book about 44 years in the Soviet Union. Two years before his death, Chester reunited with her friend at Union Station in Washington, D.C. where he had lived since re-entering the U.S.
In Russia, Chester had been treated as a celebrity. When she returned to school in the fall, she had to adjust to a lower profile. Soon after graduating, Chester realized she wasn't destined for fashion design and she chose modeling as her career.
She signed with the Grace Del Marco Agency in New York, one of the first black-owned model agencies that helped launch the career of actors such as Diahann Carroll and Cicely Tyson. Chester's jobs included advertisements for a milliner, a feature in the New York Times Magazine and the 1961 album cover of "The Nearness of You: Ballads Played By Red Garland."
In 1964, she left modeling for marriage to the late Charles Chester -- the boy next door from her Harlem neighborhood -- and motherhood. After moving to Atlanta, Chester turned to writing as a creative outlet. Her most recent work, the play "A Conversation Between Malcolm X and President Barack Obama," ran earlier this year at Emory University's White Hall.
Chester thought her memories of seven weeks in Russia were history until Hue, FIT's alumni magazine, contacted her for a feature story. For the first time in years, she delved into her memorabilia from the trip. Like a Matryoshka doll opening, her memories unfolded from crinkled edges of photographs, letters and books until finally, more than a half-century later, they were captured by Chester's pen.
Event Preview
"Black Girl in Moscow," a discussion and reading with Jacqueline Clay Chester. 4 p.m. Saturday. Free. Auburn Avenue Research Library, 101 Auburn Avenue. 404-730-4001, ext. 100. www.afpls.org/aarl.
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