The Defender Collection: Militarisation, Historical Mythology and the Everyday Affective Politics of Nationalist Fashion in Croatia

Abstract

This chapter explores civilian fashion’s fascination with military aesthetics, and the affective politics of militarisation and ethnonationalism in Croatia a generation since the country’s war of independence from Yugoslavia, through the case of clothing marketed to young people who sympathise with oppositional right-wing and anti-Communist nationalism. The national, ideological and subcultural identifications that this collection of clothing invites customers to make includes but is not limited to identifications with the recent and more distant national military past. An aesthetic approach to how political and historical mythology is visualised in this collection reveal how it constructs a certain contentious ideal of national military masculinity as normal and natural, and how broader processes of societal militarisation in Croatia have laid the foundations for this to be meaningful.