Veliki rat – velike promjene: čitanje promjena slike vojne uniforme
Great War - Great Changes: Reading the Changing Image of the Military Uniform

Summary/Abstract: This paper deals with the appearance and representation of military uniforms, which became an inevitable and standardized wartime feature during WWI. Uniforms became an important part not only for wartime, but also as an overall clothing appearance. The changes in the military uniform style displaced the previous vision of the uniform and its encoding, thus saturating the semantic space with new codes, which can be read on the level of the uniform as an object, but even more so on the basis of the photographic image rhetoric. The progress of industrialization and mass production of standardized military uniforms coincided with the emergence of the industry of creating and reproducing images (i.e. photography) in the printed media, so all information about the changes in uniform styles can be read as the changes in the encoding of the photographic representation. The paper aims to shed light on the changes that took place in the development of the military uniform as an object and the changes of its encoding within the representation of the photographic image, and it is a part of a broader research, which is still underway, focused on military uniform, appearance, meaning as forms of clothing and representational image. The Centre for fashion and clothing research is doing research under the project “Male manifest: Construction of stereotypes and representations of ‘male fantasies’ – clothing, appearance, typology, and forms of social impact of male power during socialist Yugoslavia”. The project researches and problematizes the relationship between fashion and clothing and a significant part of it is dedicated to the establishment and representation of the male military uniform – with special focus on the visual rhetoric of a photographic image.

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