Zlatibor Knitters in the Socialist Yugoslavia Media Discourse

Abstract

In the first half of the 1970s, a beautiful, young, modern and well‑groomed urban woman was the dominant figure in the media discourse of the Yugoslav women’s magazine “Bazar”. The characters of rural women appeared only sporadically. One of the few were Zlatibor knitters — rural women employed in the fashion production Sirogojno Style, which in the second half of the last century created a recognizable identity in the domestic and foreign fashion market. The aim of this paper is to compare the way in which the major and minor female characters were presented in the media discourse of the mentioned women’s magazine and to provide an answer to the question of whether (and to what extent) their media images are compatible. In terms of methodology, the paper relies on the analysis of textual and visual messages published in issues 129–285 of the women’s magazine “Bazar”.