The Fashion Bloggers Re-Branding Kosovo

Leaning against the threshold of a Kosovo restaurant, i'm expecting someone named Rita. I don’t apprehend abundant concerning her: I do apprehend she’s young, in her 20s, which she’s one amongst the primary fashion bloggers to return out of the fresh freelance state.

I study every person passing by within the Gregorian calendar month sunshine, however it’s tough to choose her out. everybody I see in Kosovo’s capital of Pristina, is young — around seventieth of the country’s population is beneath thirty five. and everybody is well-dressed.

Rita Saraqi

Rita Saraqi is a component of a growing movement of young Kosovars World Health Organization are attempting to cement the country’s new identity on-line — one that is immature, vibrant, safe. Through her diary, she aims to prove that several negative perceptions of state left over from the 1998-99 war — notions that several folks round the world still believe to be true (before I left London for state, I detected identical piece of recommendation over again: "Be careful."). 

It’s been seventeen years since state was fastened in conflict with Serbian forces, and eight years since it claimed its independence, however to outsiders, state remains a land ripped apart by group action, gangland, and also the ill-famed NATO bombing. And whereas Kosovo's sovereignty has been recognized by quite one hundred countries, together with the us, it still lacks acknowledgement and support from some major world powers (it has, as an example, been denied membership to the United Nations).

But within radiotelegraphic signal e’ Nat, Kosovo’s name clashes with reality: the idyllic restaurant has books on the walls, tiny bunches of flowers on every table, and its customers (mostly Albanians, World Health Organization ar once more a majority in Kosovo), share speech communication over macchiatos.

When Saraqi arrives, she’s wearing a dishevelled, patterned sweater and choker. She sips on tea and lends some thought to her place among the country's current bloggers. She’s twenty two and though her fashion diary, Fishnets and Rainbows has solely been running for 2 years, she says it had been Kosovo's initial.

Rita Saraqi

Since she launched it, she’s collaborated with native and international brands; she’s fronted campaigns for Mango and Benetton. A career highlight, she notes, was attending Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in Berlin, wherever she was interviewed by 2 tv stations: “It gave Pine Tree State a chance to inform folks regarding my country,” she says. 

“As a blogger, I transmit a message — I tell folks regarding province and what we tend to area unit into,” Saraqi, World Health Organization was born and raised within the country, continues. “Most folks apprehend wherever province is; they realize our history, however they suppose it’s not safe here. It’s sensible for these folks to induce to understand Pine Tree State — I will tell them however friendly it's. I will modification their perceptions.” 

But Saraqi isn't the common Kosovar. With a Macedonian mother comes a Macedonian passport, permitting her to flee the unhealthful visa restrictions that create it tough for Kosovo’s voters to go to countries within the EU and Russia, among others. “If I didn’t have a Macedonian passport, I wouldn’t be able to do what I do," she says. "If I couldn’t travel, I wouldn’t be able to meet folks, and networking could be a massive a part of my job."

Bleranda Citaku

Blogger Bleranda Citaku, of fashion web site Blers World, isn't therefore lucky. “I’ve lost a great deal of collaborations attributable to the visa scenario," she says. "I lost Milan Fashion Week." 21-year-old Citaku, United Nations agency blogs whereas learning accounting at Pristina University, says typically her visa application is rejected, and typically she doesn’t have enough time to apply; the applying method will take up to 2 months. These restrictions, however, don’t appear to possess compact her success — she has over fifty,000 Instagram followers, compared to Saraqi's sixteen,000. 

While operating with international fashion brands, Citaku has toughened primary alternative people’s mental object of her home country: There are 2 instances with brands — one Canadian, one Moroccan — wherever employees failed to recognize province even existed. If folks had detected of it, she says their minds straightaway drifted to its unrest within the late '90s. 

“If somebody is aware of concerning our country, they need to speak concerning the war,” she says. “But in Pristina [the capital], that feeling of the war, it’s reasonably gone. There area unit a great deal of dangerous things here, just like the undeniable fact that we tend to don’t have visas. however there area unit such a lot of kids, and that i suppose the new generation is absolutely trendy. There area unit sensible vibes, in general.”

Bleranda Citaku

Because visa restrictions forestall such a lot of individuals from traveling outside the Balkan region, blogs and social media became one in every of the sole ways that for teenagers in province to inform the planet concerning their country. Fashion bloggers, specifically, area unit fighting to regenerate the country’s image abroad; whereas international media options province as a dead finish, undermined by high state, violent anti-government protests, and mass migration, Saraqi and Citaku unveil a unique aspect of Europe’s newest country. On their Instagram accounts, they set street vogue shots against an area scenery, giving their international followers a glance into way of life in Pristina — one that is crammed with, like several different major cities, parks, nightlife, and ectoparasite markets, and isn't systematically suffering from conflict. 

With no established bloggers within the country to seem to for inspiration, though, Rita and Bleranda area unit exploring uncharted territory. however they don't seem to be simply tasked with educating province, its corporations, and its individuals concerning however this world works — they are tasked with victimization their platforms to sway obsolete international opinions of Kosovo: that the country isn't any longer grey and war-worn. Even a lot of essential than dynamic  outward perception is what they are doing internally: serving to establish associate degree identity through vogue in an exceedingly place that's presently operating to make its own cultural existence through creative expression. It's that power that reminds the individuals of province that the country has such potential to be a method hub, an inventive influencer, and as Saraqi says optimistically, “a happy place."

Source:CLICK HERE