Visualization of Ksenija Atanasijević in Aleksandra Lalić’s Fashion Design

Abstract

The proposed paper provides a pioneering interpretation of the Serbian philosopher Ksenija Atanasijević’s life, work and image through the framework of fashion studies. As such, it observes the ways through which her struggle with societal prejudices and gender bias of 20th-century Serbia, her authentic fashionable iconography and philosophical and ethical thoughts are visually and semiotically transposed – and transgressed – into the medium of fashion. The subject of the analysis will be three fashion collections that visualize the philosopher, by the Serbian fashion designer and art historian Aleksandra Lalić for her designer label LalicA: Comradesses, Wandering Womb and Bruno’s Conception on the Threefold Minimum and Measure. The last, in an act of feminist emancipation, directly quotes Atanasijević’s 1922 doctoral thesis defended at the University of Belgrade. By analyzing these collections, the paper will identify modalities through which the designer, both critically and polemically, reconfigures life, philosophy, looks, the feminism and antifascism of Ksenija Atanasijević into her aesthetic habitus. At the same time, Atanasijević’s philosophical deliberations are seen as a possible tool in elevating fashion as a critical cultural practice in Serbia and affirming philosophy of fashion as a potential academic discipline within the corpus of national philosophy.