Texts

GLOBAL FASHION – FASHION WITHOUT BORDERS: SAVAGE BEAUTY OF ALEXANDER MCQUEEN

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Today’s democratic society is characterized by neo-liberalism, globalization and multiculturalism. Is this society really free and open as it presents itself, or can we still find there western centrism – and hence the Other – but in а veiled form? In this ‘liberal’ society and its globalization, fashion is also globalized. But can we call this fashion, such as fashion lines of Alexander McQueen, ‘global’, and if we can, how is it expressed? Is this fashion ‘a fashion without borders’ – an amalgam of equally mixed world fashions, or is it something else? Who decides what fashion is going to be declared global and enter the global archive? Historically, arts and applied arts including fashion, have always spoken from the context of their culture, society, political discourse etc and have consciously or unconsciously always played an active role in constructing and maintaining social order and values. So, global fashion also has a role in maintaining the system it works in – the neoliberal order.

TURBO-FOLK – BALKANISM, ORIENTALISM AND OTHERNESS

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This paper analyses the turbo-folk music genre as one of the important elements of modern pop culture in Serbia as a significant representative of the Serbian cultural identity and politics, together with its many clashes and contradictions. By using a research of Edward Said and his basic assumptions of Orientalism as a dominant view of the West’s Others, we continue with regional applications of this theory by Marija Todorova, Milica Bakić-Hayden and others to question the development of internal identities developed in former Yugoslavia within these discourses and to attempt to provide an explanation for the contested values and positions of the turbo-folk phenomena to this day.

GAZE OF THE OTHER AND SELF-KNOWLEDGE: ТHE ANIMALS AS PROVOCATION

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Primarily relying on the texts of Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari and Theodor W. Adorno, this article contemplates the provocation that cats, often representative of animals in general, been able to direct us towards philosophy. Aside from the proverbial penetrativeness of the cat’s gaze which has a physiological cause, a historical and phenomenological reconstruction of its significance points to the valuable incentive that it has represented for the understanding both unity and singularity of life forms, the awareness of our epistemic limits, the release of anthropocentric prejudice, the articulation of existential situations and the insight into a humanistic policy of discrimination. The author concludes that the cat’s character, in its best literary and philosophical offshoots, warns of impingement that the Western rationality committed to everything that could not be included under its claim to universal authority, and suggests that the way of redemption for the wrongdoing leads across selective adoption and criticism of the same heritage, but now in such a manner that it could be considerate and responsible toward both discursive and the unavailability of the Others.