Croatian shift dress

Unknown designer, Croatia

CFTC #456

Gift of Helen Jewett

In 1932, Helen Jewett purchased this dress in the Zagreb region of northern Croatia. Private collectors and cultural institutions began to collect examples of European peasant and regional dress in order to document Europe’s rural “Other” in the late nineteenth century. By the twentieth century, European peasant and regional dress was used to represent an ideal image of folk life in museum collections. In fact, Jewett’s collection of Central European clothing and textiles has been used by Cornell faculty to exemplify European folk arts since 1935 when Blackmore first invited Jewett to talk about her collection at Cornell. However, the linen shift dress Jewett collected in Croatia is characteristic of interwar dress practices that conflated traditional folk art with the cut and silhouette of Parisian fashion. During this period, traditional Croatian motifs, colors, and embroidery techniques were used to embellish contemporary fashions and promote traditional woman’s handiwork. This often led the hem, necklines, cuffs, sleeves, and collars of interwar Croatian dress to be embroidered with traditional designs and motifs.