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Social Differentiation and Construction of Elites in Belgrade Studio Photography
gradually replaced by skirts and blouses. Under the fistan a blouse or tunic called
a kosulja, made from silk or home-woven cotton, was worn together with a corset
and a silk scarf crossed over it and tied with a broche. Over the scarf a libade, a
short embroidered velvet jacket with long and wide sleeves, was worn. Around the
waist another shawl or sash, mostly made of silk and called a bajader was loosely
tied in a spreading knot. If married or at a marriageable age, the woman had her
hair made into a crown braid, sometimes decorated with a headdress, such as a
tepeluk or a fes, both small caps. The tepe/uk was made of broadcloth and was em¬
broidered with pearls (see ill. 52). Braids and a bares, a decorative chaplet made
of velvet or silk, were wrapped around the cap, forming a crown braid (Prosi¢¬
Dvornié 2006: 245#; Milanovié 2007: 186).
Wearing the Serbian town costume for the Serbian townswomen was a sign of
holding on to tradition as well as to the roles assigned to them as women. At the
same time though, it was a sign of wealth and prosperity. These pieces of clothing
were made of valuable materials that were imported both from Ottoman lands and
from western European capitals such as Vienna, Paris, and Budapest. Not every¬
one could afford them, and they were usually worn for special occasions only. By
wearing the Serbian dress, women articulated their belonging to the urban bour¬
geois class in which their roles were defined as daughter, mother, or wife, similar to
women’s roles in the western European middle classes. These areas of responsibility,
however, very much differed from the tasks that had to be undertaken by peasant
women and also of working-class women, who together with men and other women
provided for the survival of the family and constituted an indispensable part of the
labor force supporting their households.
The Serbian town costume was gradually replaced beginning with the 1970s
by “Western-European-style” fashion, which especially appealed to the younger
generations (see Progi¢-Dvorni¢ 1980/81). In the group portrait (ill. 50) of Darin¬
ka Sirotanovié and her daughters Bosiljka and Branka, taken in 1911, such an
encounter of “traditional” meeting “modern” is enacted. Darinka is seated on a
bench, dressed in traditional Serbian town attire, with a long skirt, a blouse with
a silk scarf crossed over it and tied together with a broche, and a /ibade. Her hair
is fixed in a crown braid and decorated with a bares. The two young women are
dressed alike. They wear ornamented blouses and wrap-around skirts of the same
fabric. One of them is seated on another bench, which is a little below her mother’s
bench, on which one young woman is resting her elbow. ‘The youngest woman
stands behind them. A similar composition, but of men dressed in clothes of differ¬
ent influences and styles, is the group portrait (ill. 60) taken by Anastas Stojanovié
after 1865," another influential court photographer who was professionally active
some twenty years before Milan Jovanovié. In this picture of two men and a boy,
14 The photograph is not dated, which is why 1865, the year when Anastas Stojanovié started working
as a photographer in Belgrade can be taken as the earliest date of its making.
147