The Valiant Little Tailor

This year, the young Serbian fashion designer Bogomir Doringer was nominated for the Kontakt Fashion Award 2008.

He sold his first fashion creations in the school playground. In the meantime, he has become successful on the international stage. Getting there has not always been so easy.

Bogomir Doringer works as a fashion designer and studies art in Amsterdam. Fashion is only one of the ways in which the Serb likes to express himself – and it is also a good way to get people interested in his concerns. “I like to question myself, to confront myself with uncomfortable subjects. That makes my happy.”  Bogomir is twenty-five year old. He grew up in Belgrade. During the war in Ex Yugoslavia in the 90’s he saw neighbours die and his family got used to living on hardly ten German marks a week. For Bogomir war was a normal and natural state.  “How life could be or should be” he saw only in the western television programmes that could be received in Serbia. “The west always seemed like a soap-bubble to me – unrealistic. Millions of miles away from the world in which I lived.” His interest in media manipulation came from this point.
His career began early. As a teenager, he had an idea for a jacket and then found a professional seamstress – who due to the confusions of the post-war situation didn’t have any work – to sew it for him cheaply. In the school playground his creation attracted attention, and a fellow-pupil offered him 50 marks for it. Bogomir sold it to him – then asked for it back the next day. “I wore it for advertising purposes, and ordered more models from the seamstress.” The designer says that, in the beginning, fashion was a kind of therapy for him and a way of provoking his environment: “I suppose that, as a teenager, I was like the figure of the Valiant Little Tailor in the Grimm Brothers' fairytale. 

For me, fashion was an easy way to make contact with all the famous people, with politicians and film stars who accpeted disturbed post war values. It was a way to criticise the society I lived in. Directly in the face of so called jet set.” When he was only twenty years old, Bogomir was already taking part in the Belgrade fashion week. The organisers of the Fashion Week had become aware of him because the (false) rumour was going round that he had studied fashion in Tokyo for a while. Before the interview, Bogomir made some very quick fashion designs: “At the interview, I presented myself as if I already had a wealth of experience and had a whole range of designs at my disposal. After they hired me, I went out and thought: “Wow, I’ve got two weeks to put a collection of my own together! In Serbia you have to fight your way in, you have to struggle to get what you want.“ And Bogomir wanted to get out –  Since 2004 he has been studying audio-visual media at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. In 2007 he presented a fashion collection at the Berlin Fashion Week and in 2008 he was awarded the first prize for the best video and the best women’s collection at the World Fashion Film Festival in Berlin / Paris.
Bogomir is dealing in his work with serious social and political issues. Fashion is an easy way to get peoples attention,but fashion never gets itsself too much involved: "Fashion always stays in the safe corner, it does not give me enough of returning information. To overlay art with fashion is what I´m dealing with at the moment." The study of art has taught him to rid his designs from any unnecessary ballast. “Everything that I do provides me with new impulses and inspires me. I am never satisfied with what I have created and that gives me energy to always embark on something new.”

Bogomir says that the most important thing for him is to become the person that he wants to be. “Do you remember the image you had in your mind when you were a child – that image of the person you wanted to be when you grew up?” Bogomir smiles.  “Don’t forget it!”