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Serbia Serb Serbian school garments regular clothes
Serbian School Clothes: Regular Clothes
Figure 1.--This postcard back portrait shows an unidentified boy inm what looks luke a firrst day porttait. The beret of course suggesrts that this is a Frenh boy, but the jacket dies not look quite rught for France. The back pack looks rather German. The short oants and knee socks could be any European country. All we know for sure is that it was taken Deptember 14, 1937 at the beginning of a school year. The portrait is stamped 'Foto Rekord" which is not French. We think the portrait is Serbian because the dealer is Serbian and handles a lot of Serbian images.
The clothes Serbian children wore to school have of course varied over time, beginning in the mid-19th countury when public schools began to appear. They were thus affected by changing fashion trends. We see Serbian children wearing all kinds of different clothes, including stylish clothes. A few private schools may havd had uniforms, but foir the most part, Serbian children wore their regular clothes. The children wire their regular clothes, there were no specific school styles, although some secondary schools had caps like the Germans. This was all the case in the cities. It is difficult to identify Serbian children based on these clothes. This is because the styles are basically garments and styles worn in other European countries, especially Germany but to some extent France as well. We see children that we might identify as German or French if we did not known that they were Serbian or at least Yugoslav. So unless there is some provinance associated with the photograph, there is no way of identifying Serbian images. Now Serbia before World War II wwas still a very rural country with a substantial part of the population still wearing traditiinal clothing. We see that in rural village school portraits. Here we can identify Serbian clothing or at least Balkan traditional clothing.
