“Yugo-vintage?” – Preserving and Creating Memory through Clothing

Abstract

Article deals with socialist Yugoslavia-related trend in fashion in present-day Slovenia on three interwoven contexts: culturo-aesthetic, politico-ideological, and performative. These phenomena are approached from three theoretical standpoints („cloakroom communites” by Z. Baumann, retro culture researches by E. Guffey and S. Reynolds, and the theory of metamodernism by T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker) and analysed on the levels of clothing culture, fashion inovation, gender roles, and their ideological meanings. The conclusion of the study is that significance of this style lies between the extremes of pop-leftism or the tolerated, entertaining transgression, and radical symbolic opposition to the present-day dominant politics and ideologies in Slovenia. In other words, it stays precisely on the level of metamodern interrelated duality of painless simulation, and, at the same time, profound provocation or even subversion – depending on the context in which it appears.

Keywords

• Yugo-vintage
• fashion
• memory