Dystopian drama The Handmaid’s Tale now has a Russian streetwear collab

Russian streetwear brand Sputnik 1985 has dropped a new capsule inspired by dystopian US drama The Handmaid’s Tale.

Released together with Russian streaming service Videomore, the hoodies mimic the long red robes worn by women in Gilead, the show’s vision of a theocratic future America. Each sweatshirt is emblazoned with the show’s defiant call: “Don’t let the bastards grind you down”.

The series, which scooped an Emmy for Outstanding TV Drama in 2017, is based on the novel of the same name by Canadian author Margaret Atwood, written in West Berlin in 1984. Atwood has since said that her trips to socialist Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia provided key inspiration for the book, in which a Puritan dictatorship has taken over the United States.

“People were very reluctant to talk to you, unless they had a safe place to do it in and unless they were pretty certain that you weren’t going to blow their cover,” she said in an interview with Penguin Books. “It was pretty instructive, how afraid people were of saying anything that was going to get them in trouble and how careful people from the West had to be not to say, ‘and so-and-so told me this and so-and-so told me that.’”