Croatia Going Global Cultural Crossovers: from Peasant Kerchief to the Bourgeois Cravat

The 1990s were an intense period for the construction of the symbols of Croatian identity. One such project – the story of the Croatian provenance of the necktie authored by a non-profit institution named Academia Cravatica – is interesting analytically not only because they arranged some more or less spectacular cultural happenings, but because of their skilful handling of the iconic postmodern concepts of flexible identities, concentric circles and levels of identities, interactions and hybrid cultures, cultural relativism and the like. After presenting some "cravatologic" activities, I will analyse, through the history of the diffusion, transformation and changing semantics of the kerchief of Croatian peasants, the shifts to which that artefact was exposed from the 17th century to the present.