The clothing produced by 26-year-old Amna Kunovac comes from a perspective that few people, and even fewer fashion designers, will ever know.
“I used to think of life as pink. But the war taught me that the world is not nice, that people are not nice,” she says, lighting a cigarette at a cafe near the production office of Fashions Made in Sarajevo (FMS).
The war cleaned me of the nonsense; that I had before. It made me realize that the hardest thing for people to do is be truly good, and that most are evil if you let them be. And it made me understand how important it was just to stay alive.”
Kunovac lived through the siege of Sarajevo for four years, with friends being shot down in the street by Serbian snipers and shelled on the way to the market to buy bread. She lived without water, electricity gas for much of that period, and like most Sarajevans, spent a lot of time wondering about the end and the future, if there was to be one.
She says the experience made her strong. Knowing each day could be the last, she adds, her strive to make each the best.
“My designs come from years of thinking about this … out of the destruction around me, destruction of the buildings and the people,” she says. “The designs are symbolic of destruction but with the purpose of creating beauty.”
Kunovac takes flat fabric and shapes it around the body so that it flows into a living, three-dimensional world, complete with rips and gashes through which bare skin may be exposed. “In my design, I want the body to become part of the dress, making a complete look that connects and forms a symbol of life,” she says.
Her designs first took shape at the end of 1994, more than a year before the end of the war in Bosnia. An aid agency based in Dortmund, Germany, provided seed money for the birth of FMS. It took more than a month to find a suitable production place that would be safe from the shells raining down from Serb-controlled hills around Sarajevo. Once it was found, damage to the walls had to be repaired and electric lines fixed. Workers were culled from now inoperable textile factories.
But with the war still brewing and a cold winter to come, producing any of Kunovac’s designs remained a difficult proposition. Employees often could not make it to work on days of heavy shelling, or could not leave the production place for fear of getting shot. Textiles were sometimes held up in customs; drivers making a wrong turn off the United Nations-controlled, but oft-shelled, Mt. Igman road found themselves in Serb prisons.
Nature also stood in the way, bringing a bitter winter at a time when few Sarajevans had heat.
“One of our drivers spent a month in a Serb prison. Then we had the shelling and the snow,” says Kunovac. “It cost us a lot of time and money that we still haven’t recovered from. We have a shop in Sarajevo now and people are buying the clothes. But it’s still a hand-to-mouth existence and we haven’t covered all of our expenses.”
Kunovac says she was fascinated with fabric as a child. Her father was a textile manufacturer and would often leave swatches of cloth around the family home. She soon began making clothing for her dolls and even created the dolls themselves out of fabric, stuffing each with cotton.
“I didn’t do anything else. I didn’t play with other girls or my friends. I was enough with myself,” she says. “Later this personal game developed into fashion design.”
When she was 14, Kunovac enrolled in a Sarajevo secondary school with a focus on art and drawing. She continued to design clothing and learn about the textile industry, then enrolled in a Sarajevo art academy in 1988, where she designed industrial products and free-form pieces. The latter work brought her to a line of thought that she has carried into her present clothing designs.
“There is a sharpness of edges and a strictness of form,” she says. “And a lot of cuts and twists intended to show inner movement and life.”
Some of the clothing was displayed in the Louvre in Paris last month, after Kunovac won a design contest sponsored by UNESCO. She was one of 50 young designers chosen from more than 2,000 applicants worldwide.
Most of the FMS clothing is limited-edition, with 8 to 10 pieces made from each design. Kunovac hopes to stay away from mass production, saying her clothes must fit a woman and not be imposed upon her form.
Her clients range in age from their teens to early 30s, and include many Bosnian TV newscasters and personalities. When funding permits, Kunovac would like to begin exporting to other countries.
“We are one of the few organizations in Bosnia that are more than humanitarian aid. We employ people and are building something for the future,” she says. “In that, we hope that we present the spirit of Sarajevo, showing our professionalism and capacity for craftsmanship.”
“Our logo is of a female form, but it also looks like a candle and has come to symbolize the years in Sarajevo without light,” she adds. “I like that it shows where we have come from, and how far we have gone.”
