From Collective Creativity to Authorship: Examples of the Personalization of Fashion Designers in Socialist Yugoslavia

Socialist creativity, understood as a form of collective creativity, was based on the engagement of shared human capacities in order to achieve an envisioned project of modernity and a bright future. In its attempt to erase the distinction between manual and intellectual labor, official ideology promoted the direct implementation of imaginative and creative ideas into production. Within such a cultural context, there was little room for the fashion designer, as an individual, to express creative genius. Nevertheless, from the mid-1960s onwards, radical changes occurred in the practice of Yugoslav socialism. Economic reform, the rise of a socialist middle class, and the rapid development of the Yugoslav textile and fashion industry - which increasingly penetrated demanding international markets year after year - led to the personalization of fashion designers, among whom the most prominent figures were Dobrila Vasiljević Smiljanić, Aleksandar Joksimović, and Mirjana Marić. While the name of Dobrila Vasiljević Smiljanić, a designer of hand-knitwear from Sirogojno, remained inseparably linked to numerous named and unnamed knitters producing designs within a cooperative system, thus embodying the idea of collective creativity and shared effort, the designs of Aleksandar Joksimović and Mirjana Marić came to be recognized as products bearing an authorial signature. However, Joksimović’s fashion production largely remained unnamed, in contrast to the creations of Mirjana Marić for Belgrade-based Jugoeksport, Moda from Veliko Gradište, and Rudnik from Gornji Milanovac, which acquired an explicit authorial label during the 1970s and 1980s.