Clothing as a Sign of Otherness: An Imagological Reading of Women’s Travel Writing from the Balkans

Abstract

This paper investigates clothing as a semiotic marker of cultural and gendered otherness in women’s travel writing, focusing on narratives about the Balkans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The study examines the symbolic meanings and ideological roles of clothing in the travel writings of Georgina Muir Mackenzie, Adeline Paulina Irby, Rebecca West, and Jelena Dimitrijević, using an interdisciplinary approach that brings together imagology, gender studies, and postcolonial theory.

In these travelogues, clothing emerges not only as a descriptive ethnographic element but also as a crucial sign of difference through which identity, power, and cultural hierarchy are articulated. The analysis reveals that attire is used to construct and reinforce the binary oppositions of modern/traditional, West/East, and visible/invisible, often serving as a means to position the observed subject in relation to the traveler’s own cultural framework.

The Western female authors tend to emphasize the exoticism or backwardness of the cultures they encounter by focusing on garments such as veils, long robes, or richly adorned traditional costumes. These descriptions frequently align with colonial narratives, where clothing becomes a visual shorthand for cultural inferiority or subjugation. At the same time, garments are occasionally romanticized as symbols of authenticity or resistance to modernity, particularly in the case of Balkan Christian communities, whose clothing is portrayed with admiration and symbolic elevation.

Jelena Dimitrijević, as a local, offers a different narrative strategy. Her position as both insider and observer allows her to engage more subtly with questions of gender, tradition, and modernity. While she critiques patriarchal restrictions encoded in certain clothing practices, she also affirms cultural autonomy through detailed descriptions of textile practices, embroidery, and material symbolism. This dual position complicates the orientalist gaze and offers a nuanced counter-discourse.

The key findings of the study show that clothing in women’s travel writing operates on multiple levels: as a medium of ideological inscription, a marker of cultural memory, a gendered metaphor, and a terrain of contestation between submission and self-expression. Ultimately, the travel texts analyzed here demonstrate how garments become visual texts that encode perceptions of the Other, reflect cultural anxieties, and construct both individual and collective identities through dress.