Mevlida Tadić had run a fashion house on Ferhadija Street for thirty years and had never once admitted that she did not understand something. So in September she nodded when two consultants, Mensur Vasić and Nevres Dragić, laid an empty cardboard tube on her desk and said it held Yorkshire wool that only people of refined eye could see. "A fool sees nothing," said Mensur. "And the House of Tadić has no fools."
They charged eighty-six thousand marks in advance for the autumn collection. For ten days they worked behind locked doors above the workshop, and through them came only the sound of scissors cutting air. Every morning Mevlida stood at the door with a coffee she was not allowed to carry in, because the consultants demanded total silence and, as they put it, clean air for the fabric. The seamstresses walked down the hallway with their heads bowed. Nobody wanted to be the first to say that all she saw were wooden mannequins. The old head of the sewing room, Milica, said the fabric was "too sharp for her eyes," and everyone took it as praise.
The show was on Saturday in a hall of the hotel at Skenderija. The deputy mayor came, along with three magazine editors, a blogger with three hundred thousand followers, and a former beauty queen. The models came out one after another in plain white leotards, chins raised, with the walk of people carrying a hundred kilos of silk. At the first entrance the audience applauded. At the second it nodded. At the third, two women in the front row sighed: "That waist. That drape."
"The hem of the sleeve," whispered the deputy mayor, who had been searching for the sleeves with his eyes for a full five minutes. One editor wrote "raw elegance" in her notebook. The blogger told his phone that Sarajevo had not seen such boldness in a long time. Mevlida sat in the front row and saw a plain white leotard. She saw it clearly, and with each entrance she grew more certain that she was the only one in the hall who saw it that way, so she raised her chin and said quietly to her assistant: "Magnificent." He nodded too late and too loudly.
In the fourth row sat Nuhi, the seven-year-old son of one of the seamstresses, brought along because there was nobody to leave him with. He watched the models for a long time and finally, in a voice that dropped into the silence between two songs, asked: "Mama, why is everybody wearing those gym shirts?"
The first to laugh was a girl in the back row. Then an editor, then the blogger, then the deputy mayor, who tried to turn his laughter into a cough and failed. Within seconds the whole hall was laughing, and the models, not knowing where to go, kept walking with the same seriousness, which made it worse. Nuhi's mother covered her face with her hands, not from shame but so she would not have to see Mevlida. Mevlida could not stand up.
Mensur and Nevres vanished before the last entrance. By Monday their phones were already switched off, and the accountant reported that the money had gone to a foreign account as early as Friday morning. When Mevlida opened the cardboard tube, she found only a slip of paper inside: "Thank you for your trust. We never said the fabric could be seen."
That afternoon she brought a piece of gray wool cloth into the workshop and, without a single consultant, cut a small coat herself. Nuhi tried it on Wednesday. "It itches," he said. "It itches," she said. "That means it is there." The seamstresses watched them from the doorway. Nobody asked anything, and that week more sewing got done than in the whole autumn.