"Love and Fashion" - Consumer Culture in Yugoslav Socialism
In the film Love and Fashion (Ljubomir Radičević, 1960) two Yugoslav fashion companies entangle in a competition to organize a major fashion show in Belgrade with Italian models. A young student proudly driving her Lambretta scooter, and also operating a glider flying over Belgrade with her friends, becomes the main support to achieve the plans of one of the companies. The first sex-symbol of Yugoslav cinema, companies mercilessly fighting each other to gain some profit, western cars drifting through a modern city, trendy students of architecture and art history dancing to swing and rock ... The talk will use this film as a point of departure to analyze processes and incongruities of economic reforms in Yugoslavia since the late 1950s, official rhetoric reconciling utopian vision of communism and the new consumerist utopia, as well as to speculate upon the modes of understanding the discourse of imagining "transition".
Branislav Dimitrijević (Belgrade, 1967) is Professor of History and Theory of Art, artwriter and curator. He lectures at the School for Art and Design (VSLPUb) and Akademija Nova in Belgrade. With Branislava Andjelković and Branimir Stojanović he co-founded and coordinated “School for History and Theory of Images”, an independent educational project in Belgrade (1999-2003). He has been publishing essays on contemporary art and theory of art, film and visual culture, and he edited a series of publications and exhibition catalogues including On Normality: Art in Serbia 1989-2001 (MOCAB, 2005) and Good Life: Physical Narratives and Spatial Imagination (KCB, 2012). His curatorial projects include: Murder1 (CKZD, Belgrade 1997), Konverzacija (MOCAB, 2001), Situated Self: Confused, Compassionate, Conflictual (Helsinki City Museum; MOCAB, 2005), Breaking Step – Displacement, Compassion and Humour in recent art from Britain (MOCAB, 2007), FAQ Serbia (ACF, New York, 2010). He was curator of the Yugoslav/Serbian pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 2003 and 2009. He holds an MA in History and Theory of Art from the University of Kent (England) and he has completed a PhD thesis on “Consumer Culture in Socialist Yugoslavia” at the University of Arts in Belgrade.