2025
TV program “The Nineties”, curated by Danijela Purešević and transmitted on the 3rd Channel of the RTS - Serbian Radio Television network
Within “The Nineties”, invited by the art-historian and curator Danijela Purešević, I curated five-minute features on emerging fashion designers and phenomena called “Fashion in Belgrade”.
Although we managed to film only three episodes, the opportunity to showcase experimental, alternative, artistic, strange, ironic, and bizarre fashion on one of the leading TV channels of the national network was a big deal for all of us.
My task was to find designers and creatives, conceive a way to present them on video, organise shooting and filming, find a location and models, and write a brief intro.
These texts are brief intros of TV features, which included Hristina Radović, Mladen Tušup and a collective Eržike LSD.
In March 1992, when this TV clip was made, the war escalated with a referendum for independence in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which Bosnian Serbs boycotted, leading to violence, including the declaration of a Serb Republic in Bosnia, and the start of the Siege of Sarajevo. These events marked the transition from conflicts in Croatia to a large-scale conflict in Bosnia.
It was surreal trying to find some kind of normality in creative and fashion work, but at the same time, it felt like our way to resist.
Mladen Tušup graduated from the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade in 1990. At the time, he was making artistic fashion and theatre costumes.
1992
MLADEN TUŠUP
The young Belgrade designer, Mladen Tušup, constantly explores the boundary between a fashion item, which has its own specific use and function, and an object that, by establishing a relationship with a body or a space, transforms into something else — a sculpture or a form for expressing pure creative imagination.
His creations evoke gesture and movement, enhancing the ongoing transformation of their geometrical and symmetrical shapes. They call for a continual play of the body, creating movement that is translated into continually changing sculptural forms.
Mladen Tušup is interested in the rhythm and movement. His creations make us think about the impermanence and change, as well as the mystery of the body when partly concealed or revealed.
He uses flexible, plastic materials, which he drapes and interweaves around the body. With exquisite inventiveness and imaginative boldness, he “adorns” the body with his geometric laces, alluding to endless possibilities of combining and recombining them.
His creations serve as a metaphor for constant transformation, where the boundary between what we consider a fashion item and an art object is entirely unstable, even irrelevant.
For “The Nineties” TV program on art and culture, for the 3rd channel of the national broadcasting network RTS (Radio Televizija Srbije)
Mladen Tušup, head piece and gown, 1992
Model: Slađana Milošević
Photo by Mr. Čupko
Mladen Tušup, head piece and twin set
Model: Slađana Milošević
Photo by Gordan Škondrić
Mladen Tušup, head piece
Model: Slađana Milošević
Photo by Vukica Mikača
Mladen Tušup, head piece
Model: Slađana Milošević
Photo by Vukica Mikača
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