Илустрације Љубице Цуце Сокић за компанију „Жифре” у контексту развоја индустрије лепоте и моде 1950-их и 1960-их година
Ljubica Cuca Sokić’s illustrations for Gifrer-Barbezat in the context of the development of beauty industry and fashion in the 1950’s and the 1960’s

Summary/Abstract: Following the increasing academic development of fashion studies and the growing popularity of fashion exhibitions in museums worldwide, the paper contextualises hitherto insuf­fi­ciently researched commercial and fashion illustrations of Serbian painter and academician Ljubica Cuca Sokić (1914–2009) regarding the development of fashion and advertising, both internationally and in Yugoslavia, in the 1950s and 1960s. Discovered only in 2020, these illustrations, created for the French pharmaceutical company Gifrer, opened up new possibilities for interpreting the artist’s oeuvre and her expression as an illustrator through the framework of fashion history. They were representations of her artistic treatment of contemporary fashion trends from the mid-20th century and their translation into illustrations. Resonating with the dominance of French haute couture, predominantly Christian Dior, Cristobal Balenciaga, and Yves Saint Laurent’s designs on one, and the reception and reconfiguration of its iconography in Yugoslav fashion print on the other side, Cuca Sokić’s illustrations can be observed not only as the extension of her life in Paris but as well as one artist’s creative response to fashion as a formidable cultural phenomenon and artistic practice in the 20th century. Despite being less numerous compared to her extensive painterly oeuvre, the illustrations appear in a decent variety of forms – as finalised illustrations for cosmetic products; miniature ‘fashion portraits’; studies combining figuration and geometric abstraction with Fauvist and Neoplasticist colour palettes; paper cut-out collages of dresses; and fashion sketches. Through all these forms of her fashion works, Sokić demonstrated admirable sensibility and awareness of tendencies in the beauty industry and fashion design, illustration, and photography of the late 1950s and the early and mid-1960s and their relation to fine arts, further strengthening the importance of fashion in the canon of the national history of art.

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