In 2018, the record-breaking Croatian football team that reached the men's World Cup final played mostly in a strip that contrasted with the colours many spectators expected: the black and midnight-blue chequerboard of their reserve kit, transposing Croatia's famous red and white checks into a darker palette, which when compressed into long camera shots or small smartphone screens looked all-black. This departure from Croatia's traditional blue reserve kit with red-and-white chequerboard details, familiar from past tournaments’ iconic images, appeared dramatic and unusual, as its designers at Nike intended: the Croatian captain Luka Modrić, in Nike's press release, described it as ‘daring, confident and tough; characteristics that also describes [sic] the spirit of our team’. At home, however, all-black also had potential historical and ideological connotations which only activated for onlookers who already knew that struggles over the memory of the collaborationist Independent State of Croatia (NDH) of 1941–5 and its blackuniformed ‘Ustaša’ militia have been contentious in Croatia ever since Croatia's war of independence from Yugoslavia. The anti-nationalist journalist Drago Pilsel, for instance, wrote on Facebook: ‘I don't cheer for people wearing black. End of story.’ The politics of militarisation in Croatia, in other words, gave black different connotations – which the aesthetic and embodied dimensions of fashion, and of identification with the nation and its military, help to explain.

The dynamics of militarisation in Croatia are simultaneously the dynamics of ethnonational homogenisation, permeating into everyday life, that characterised the public culture of the 1991–5 ‘Homeland War’ and institutionalised an official patriotism which turned the war of independence into a new founding myth. Indeed, ‘retraditionalization’ of Croatian politics and society around nationalism after the Yugoslav federation collapsed and Franjo Tuđman's Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ) won Croatia's multi-party elections in April–May 1990 was (as elsewhere in postsocialist Europe) also a patriarchal reaction: politics and media were strengthening a binary of women as ‘the passive body to be protected’ and men as ‘the nation's active agent and soul, ever ready to protect and defend’ strengthened even before the war. The ‘gendered narrative of war and nationhood’ that defined symbolic national bodies (e.g. maternal, victimised or armed bodies) ethnically was, Dubravka Žarkov argues, the Croatian (and Serbian) media's chief representational strategy in creating the Self/Other stereotypes that legitimised iolence during the war.