Women’s Press in Socialist Yugoslavia – Mediaportrayal of Dobrila Smiljanić in the Women’s Magazine “Bazar”

Abstract

This paper examines the way in which the character of Dobrila Smiljanić was presented in the media discourse of socialist Yugoslavia. She was a fashion designer who, using motifs from the traditional thesaurus, created the fashion brand Sirogojno style, recognizable on the national and international markets during the second half of the 20th century. The work aims to: 1) recognize and distinguish fabricated media images of Dobrila Smiljanić; 2) point to the degree of harmonization of those (and such) media representations of the fashion designer with the official socialist idea of women and “female nature”, and 3) discuss, in  the context of socialist ideology, the manifest and latent role of the messages that were thus sent to the Yugoslav readers’ audience. In a methodological sense, the paper relies on the data obtained from the analysis of textual and visual messages in the highly circulated Yugoslav women’s magazine “Bazar” during the 1970s (issues no. 129–389), as well as the data obtained from a semistructured interview conducted in 2014 with fashion designer Dobrila Smiljanić.