"I am a nomad between East and West"

The young Serbian fashion designer Slobodan Mihajlovic is the winner of this year's "Kontakt.Fashion Award 2007". "Report" author Susanne Firzinger talked to him in Vienna on the occasion of the award-giving ceremony.

"So far I have had a great deal of luck in my life", says fashion designer Slobodan Mihajlovie who lives in Serbia, "but a lot of my colleagues have not been so fortunate. Through the international economic embargo against Serbia they are unfortunately still very isolated." The fashion maker (born in 1975) is no longer unknown, and has had a number of international successes: to date he has taken part in numerous projects at home and abroad, above all in Italy and Belgium, and has already worked for star labels such as Mina Poe and Roberto Cavalli. For his own collection  "slobodan *+*", (pronounced "star plus star") he was awarded the Erste Bank  "Kontakt. Fashion Award" at the end of June 2007 in the context of the Vienna fashion event "7 festival for fashion and photography“. The "Kontakt. Fashion Award" is intended to promote designers from the Central and Easter European area. Does Mihajlovic consciously refer to his Eastern European roots?  "Eastern European art is often contradictory", this designer finds, "on the one hand it is painful and heavy, but at the same time beautiful, light and humorous. This ambivalence lies in the culture of the Balkans, in our temperament and our history", says the fashion designer. "I myself am a nomad between East and West. I live between Serbia, Belgium and Italy. In my work I attempt to combine the best from both worlds – East and West. 

Slobodan Mihajlovic was born in Gradacac, a small town in northern Bosnia-Herzegowina. As a child he sketched his first fashion designs in his school copybooks and was fascinated by the traditional handcrafts of his native country: "My mother was an expert in handcrafts. I knew at an early stage that I wanted to be a fashion designer and she always supported me. My father, on the other hand, was for a long time of the opinion that it would be better for me to practice a 'proper profession' and to become a lawyer." 

At the beginning of the 1990s Mihajlovic began to study at the "Yugoslavia Fashion College" in Belgrade: "At the time The Eastern European fashion scene was completely cut off from the outside world. There was hardly any information from the West." This isolation restricted the young artists but at the same time awakened a great curiosity in many of them about how to use with native resources, which resulted in extraordinarily original ideas with a "very personal touch", as Mihajlovic finds: "But politics can ruin even the greatest commitment. Serbian fashion is still almost entirely restricted to the local market. One still has to queue for hours to get a visa. My sister could not get a visa to come to the "Kontakt. Fashion Award" ceremony in Vienna. I don't understand why an entire people has to suffer just because two war criminals have vanished", says a disappointed Mihajlovic. 

After his time in Belgrade the young designer completed his studies at the  "Royal Academy of Fine Arts" in Antwerp. He later designed accessories and knitted goods for the Paris haute couture label "Mina Poe" and also worked for Roberto Cavalli.
In 2006 Mihajlovic began to work on his own collection – in collaboration with Eo Bocci, an Italian fashion scout and financer who supported the careers of designers such as Jean Paul Gaultier and Ann Demeulemeester. The effort seems to have been worth while: for his current collection that the designer devoted to Greek antiquity  "slobodan *+*“ was granted the "Kontakt. Fashion Award 07" and was also declared winner of the "Belgrade Fashion Week“ for the collection spring/summer 2007. 

For the coming season Mihajlovic is deepening his study of the Renaissance. The designer is particularly fascinated by Beato Angelico, an artist of the Florentine Renaissance, but is also interested in a representative of contemporary pop culture: the British pop singer Morrisey provided the designer with the inspiration for his men's collection 2008. For Mihajlovic Morrissey's work and charisma have a something timeless about them, reminiscent of the qualities of his "Florentine muse".  


Kontakt. Fashion Award by Erste Bank:
 http://www.kontakt.erstebankgroup.net/projects/overview/at_kontakt_fashion_award/en

Author Susanne Firzinger writes for the magazine  "skug" and the "Planet Music Magazin", among others.