Women’s Urban Dress and National Costume in Serbia in the 19th Century

During the first decades of the 19th century, the appearance of urban dress in Serbia was fully harmonized with the Ottoman-Balkan cultural model and the shared visual culture of the inhabitants of Ottoman cities. In the book Putešestvije po Serbiji (Travels in Serbia), Joakim Vujić described in detail the dress of the urban population, that he saw during his visit to Belgrade in 1826. In the illustration of Grigorije H. J. Vujić in the same book, you can see men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing, significantly different from what we recognize today as the Serbian urban dress and national costume of the 19th century. The dominant element of this dress pattern is the anterija (Turkish: entari), a distinctive long dress open in the front, which was worn both by men and women throughout the Ottoman Empire over wide, baggy trousers – dimije (Turkish: şalvar).

After the end of the uprising period, and especially after gaining autonomy in 1830, the pluralism of cultural models came to the fore in the Principality of Serbia. At that time, the national costume was created by selecting characteristic garments from the dress inventory of the urban population, living in formerly Ottoman cities. The process unfolded parallelly with the establishment of the European fashion system and the new bourgeois elite perceived the constructed national costume as authentically national dress, which is why it was often used in family portraits as a visual marker of identity. Family portraits were gradually introduced into Serbian bourgeois culture from the end of the 18th century in the Habsburg Monarchy while the citizens of the Principality of Serbia adopted the practice of owning family portraits at the beginning of the 19th century, adapting their iconography to the needs and ideas of their own milieu. In public and private collections, numerous portraits have been preserved to this day, which were an indispensable part of the urban interior, and emphasized the social status of the persons depicted.

The basic variant of the women’s national costume consisted of a fistan – a long dress, cut at the waist, with a characteristic heart-shaped neckline, then a shirt, a scarf to cover the chest, a bayader – a wide, patterned silk belt, libade – a short jacket with wide sleeves, as well as a headdress – fez and tepeluk. As a newly formed dress of the elite social class and a costume type imprinted with a national character, it appears in the official portraits of Princesses Ljubica Obrenović and Persida Karađorđević. Speaking about Princess Ljubica’s dress, the German travel writer Otto Dubislav Pirch stated in 1829 that it can be even plainer than that of other urban women, the only difference being beautiful sable fur and a brilliant in her hair. British admiral Adolphus Slade says that during the meeting, in 1838, the princess was dressed in the Greek style, in a fur jacket, cloak, and with a turban on her head. The brilliant in her hair particularly stood out as part of the headdress of Princess Persida’s rich urban dress. The large and expensive brooch of flower bouquet – grana, which decorated her headband – bareš, resembled a diadem. The richness of the princess’s costume is also shown by her portrait from the collection of the National Museum of Serbia, the work of Katarina Ivanović from 1846–1847.

In the visual representation of members of Serbian ruling and bourgeois families, we often find elements of the national costume combined with modern clothing. In the official portrait, painted around 1865, Princess Julija Obrenović is shown, in accordance with current European fashion trends, in a dress with crinoline, with which she wears libade and tepeluk. Also, in 1881, Carl Goebel painted Princess Natalija Obrenović, dressed in a luxurious dress with a bustle, combined with parts of the national costume. The first portrait is kept today in the National Museum of Serbia, and the second in the Museum of the City of Belgrade.

It is common for family photos from the last decades of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century to show married couples dressed in such a way that the woman wears a variation of the national costume while the man wears a modern men’s suit. From the traditional elements of the national costume, which were worn in combination with modern dresses of European cut, the libade and tepeluk persisted the longest in the women’s clothing inventory. The French Slavic scholar Louis Léger recorded in 1873 that the embroidery on the libade and the pearl on the fez [tepeluk] were left […] until now as a legacy to the female members of the family and they passed from the mother’s wardrobe to the daughter’s outfit. Léger also states that he saw people wearing pearls worth one hundred ducats on their fez.