Uniform, Mijo Pošinovec, 1913.
On March 4, 2016, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the First World War, the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Zagreb hosted a scientific-professional conference The Great War: Folklore, Ethnological and Cultural Anthropological Aspects, attended by Tonči Vladislavić (CIMO – Center for Research of Fashion and Clothing, Zagreb) gave a lecture entitled The Great War - Great Changes: reading changes in the image of military uniforms on the examples of photographic representation.
The conference was organized by the Croatian Ethnological Society, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research and the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Zagreb.
The paper deals with the appearance and representation of military uniforms, which became an inevitable and standardized war attribute in the First World War. They became an important part of the war, but also of the overall clothing image. Changes in war uniforms displace the previous vision of the uniform and its coding, producing the filling of the semantic space with new codes, and can be read at the level of the uniform as an object, but even more in the rhetoric of the photographic image. The progress of industrialization and mass production of standardized military uniforms coincides with the industry of creating and reproducing images (photographs) in the print mass media, so all information about changes in uniform is read as changes in the coding of the photographic representation. The paper seeks to show visible the changes that have taken place in the development of the military uniform as an object, as well as the changes in coding within the representation of the photographic image on examples of domestic provenance.
Keywords: World War I, clothing, military uniforms, photographic rhetoric, photographic representations
Link:
The text was published in the scientific journal Studia ethnologica Croatica, Vol.28 No.1, December 2016, and is available in open access, via the link:
http://hrcak.srce.hr/index.php?show=toc&id_broj=13855
* The text is part of the research work on the project Male Manifesto: Forms of Visual Representation and Appearance of Male Identity in the Media Culture of Yugoslav Socialism,CIMO, 2016.
* The project is supported by the City Office for Culture, Education and Sports of the City of Zagreb / for 2016.
* Photo: Private archives t.v.
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