Fashion and pilgrimage: Discourses constructing Romani identity

Abstract

Our study interprets the activities and products of Romani Design, a Budapest-based high fashion company. We discuss their creative technique and ideology, which programmatically construct a distinctive Romani identity in their fashion products. Their activities take part not just in the maistream world of fashion shows and fashion business but they also appear in special spaces of representation, for example, in a major city museum exhibition, mobilizing visual parallels with eighteenth-century artistic paintings. They also take part in a religious, ritual event, the dressing of the statue of the Virgin Mary in a church in the Romani community space of the Csatka pilgrimage feast. All three event spaces serve to position a “Gypsy” identity, as well as a confident but also contradictory Romani bodily-spiritual projection through objects and their placement. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .