Dubravka Ugrešić: The Age of Skin (excerpt in English)

The Age of Skin

In the second half of the twentieth century, former Yugoslavs traveled
to Trieste, in neighboring Italy, for shoes, handbags, and jackets (of
real leather, of course). Later they hotfooted it to cheaper Istanbul,
hauling leather sartorial goods back to Yugoslav flea markets. The guy
with the gold cross and leather jacket was quite the catch. But it wasn’t
long until cheap imitations dimmed the shine of real leather. The wee
men and women in leather jackets took a slide down into the so-called
“trash,” before leather slipped even further down, into subculture,
whence it rose again to become a “czaress,” a fetish, a cult.

Translated by David Williams
(source: Vilenica Almanac 2016)