Serbian traditional clothing

Like any traditional dress of a nation or culture, it has been lost to the advent of urbanization, industrialization, and the growing market of international clothing trends.

The wide range of regional folk costumes show influence from historical Austrian, Hungarian, German, Italian, and Ottoman Turkish presence.

This change has started in larger settlements such as cities and towns, although it was not uncommon to see rural women in traditional working costumes all the way until the end of 1970s.

In some areas it was replaced by an upper sleeveless dress of red or blue cloth, knee-long, richly decorated and buttoned in front (zubun).

[2] By the late 1870s, the male Serbian urban costume favored by officials and the mercantile class (when not wearing increasingly popular Western fashion) still consisted principally of braided Turkish-cut breeches, an embroidered vest, and a striped cashmere or silk shawl, several yards in length, wrapped around the torso in which ornamental pistols and swords were placed.

On festive occasions, special sewn embroidered vest were worn, especially embellished with gold embroidery called formeti, nedra, and plastroni.

Women wear black plush skirts, white blouses and highly decorated libada embroidered with gold srma, dimije [sh] (shalwar pants), pafta around waist and tepeluk on the head.

Regardless of the relative isolation and lack of connection in communication between the investigated territories and other regions, change penetrated even this area and was reflected not only in daily life but also in the adoption of new, or abandoned old, pieces of dress for practical or functional reasons.

The sleeves, aprons, zbubins, rugs in ornamentation are dominated by geometric shapes – rhombuses, squares, crosses, stylized flowers and twigs.

In an elaborate scale of handicrafts, the dominant place is occupied by the manufacture of rugs, which were usually two-faced, woven on a horizontal break by two techniques – squatting and kneeling.

The aprons are vividly embroidered, richly decorated with gold embroidery (with floral motifs dominated by vines, roses, flowers, tulips, carnations).

As part of a cultural zone with Albania and North Macedonia, the attire has likeness to those in adjacent Albanian and Macedonian provinces, such as jelek, zubun, anterija, opanak, gunj, and fez instead of šajkača.

The wealth of imagination and craftsmanship in creating basic shapes and decorative motifs are visible on jeleci, dolame, zubuni, anterije, shirts, aprons, belts, headscarves, headgear, caps, etc., made by women, girls and terzije (folk costume tailor).

The vast rural population did not significantly modernize in terms of dressing until the Balkan wars and liberating these areas from centuries-old Turkish rule.

From the 1920s, elements of the Serbian military uniform have been observed in the men's folk costume of the Serbs: wearing šajkače and trousers on a bridge instead of an Old Balkan type čakšir.

Of the upper parts of the garments that are worn stand out the most beautifully shaped wide-brimmed robe known as a zubun, made of white cloth, sleeveless, long to the knees and open at full length front.

Wrinkled aprons, usually woolen or in combination with cotton, up to a half thigh length or shorter, colored with intense red and green, are an integral part of traditional women's costume.

The well-known bride's ornament in the Metohija-Kosovo area was a kovanik (coin belt), made up of brass plates with polychrome stones and agates.

In such a widespread area there is a large number of variants of Serbian costumes with significant differences in the pattern of clothing, ornamentation or in the way of wearing individual pieces.

The main features of the Dinaric Men's costume are: shorter linen shirt, čakšire pants, Woolen ječerma robe, cloths, socks, opanci, and red cap with or without fringe.

For other parts of the dinar costume, sheep's wool is used, which women washed, scratched, combed, covered with, and woven from such threads, which is left raw or dyed in blue, black or red.

However, having lost the original role and function of framing the face, it became a long metal strip, with a series of sewn silver pieces that a girl ready to be married receives in a dowry from her parents.

Women wear home-made linen dresses with darker embroidery around sleeves, weaved fringed apron, dark-blue zobun made of heavy cloth hemmed with dark-red narrow stripes and a cap on the head.

[22] The number of variants that adapt the Baranya to all the needs of the seasons, canons of certain age groups and differences in economic position are underlined in two geographically specific types of Danube and Podravina costumes.

In Bukovica, a part of northern Dalmatia inhabited by Serbs for centuries, folk costumes of specific forms have been maintained for longer than in other areas.

The work uses primarily the rich material of the Ethnographic Museum in Belgrade, which contains sets and individual parts of the costume from the Serbian regions of northern Dalmatia: Bukovica, Benkovac, Ravni Kotari, Knin, Cetinska and Drniška Krajina from the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, written and visual sources from 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, the results of an independent field survey conducted from 1993 to 1995 in Bukovica and Ravni Kotari, as well as data obtained in interviews with indicators expelled from these areas in 1995.

[24] They are married with a home-made or shopping shirt, embroidered in wool, thin, tailored, which they themselves wrap in four different colors: blue, green, black, red, etc.

Although they lived in the same area, the people had very distinct differences, peculiarities and specificities, both in historical, spiritual, cultural, dialect, and in terms of folk traditions.

The ceremonial costume that became a symbol of the Serb ethnic community in Montenegro was created by Prince-Bishop Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, who also liked to wear it himself.

When worn by Njegoš, the costume was described in elaborate detail: "He wore a red waistcoat, hemmed with gold; the shirt sleeves which could be seen under the sleeveless jacket were of the finest linen...; he had the weapon belt tied around his waist and the brown girdle with two guns and the long dagger stuck into it.