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Exhibitions :::
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Actual exhibition
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Skadar Džube Chemise - a tale of one item and three cultures Author: Mirjana Menković Ethnographic museum in Belgrade May 16th 2009 – Jun 2009 |
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The six items of clothing kept in the Urban Dress Collection of the
Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade and classified as Skadar džube chemises,
or having their origins linked to the town of Skadar, were procured at
the end of the nineteenth century by Dr Sima Trojanović, the Museum’s
first curator and director, who recorded that they belonged to the
assortment of clothes of the town’s Orthodox, Catholic and Muslim women
populations. Research has shown that they represented the final stage in
the use of this once widespread item of clothing, which had diverse
purposes and social significance and functions. Compared to the
highly-developed and widely spread design of the džube (a vest reaching
below the knees, open at the front all the way, with a wavy back part
and rich ornaments made of gold thread and ribbons), an item of clothing
of Oriental origins, whose parallels can be found not only among the
garments worn in the other regions of the European part of the Ottoman
Empire, but in its Asian part as well, in the Middle East and North
Africa, the Skadar džube has its own special features – at the end of
the 19th century it was shorter than the common type and was
predominantly made of dark red rolled woolen cloth with characteristic
circular kuljače ornaments made of silk ribbons. Therefore it seems
rather appealing to demonstrate on this item the process of
acculturation, the meaning and reasons behind the process of
appropriation of certain items of clothing, how it was changed and used
at the level of different religious denominations, what its function
was, and how urban populations communicated at the level of this
division. |
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In its highly-developed, luxurious variant, this item of clothing was a
constituent part of the Serbian urban dress in Kosovo-Metohija towns,
among which Prizren is always to stand out in respect to its importance
and influence. This was also the second type of the Serbian urban dress
that had been spontaneously formed since 1820s. While the Serbian urban
dress in the principality and, later, kingdom of Serbia followed the
process of building the national identity of the young Serbian state
without colliding with the country’s desired modernization
(Europeanization), the exemplary urban dress of the Serbs in Prizren was
a strong expression and indicator of the growing power of the Serbian
urban populations. The goal of this exhibition is to draw the attention
of the public to this neglected urban style of dress. The fact that the džube was first part of men’s dress and then, like some other items of clothing that were important in the economic and symbolic senses (e.g. the binjiš, a men’s red cloak, which has its counterpart among women’s street clothes), in a rather different design, achieved great popularity as part of women’s dress – has served as the basis for the media campaign accompanying this exhibition. The campaign has been realized through the Modernity on the Trail of Tradition, An Exhibition in my Street project, an integral part of this exhibition presented in Knez Mihailova Street in May and June 2009. |
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