A small economic miracle
Through the 1990s Novi Pazar produced around twenty million pairs of jeans a year and earned the nicknames "the valley of denim" and "a small economic miracle". The goods were sold at a commodity market of some six hundred stalls, at prices where — as people said at the time — a whole family could be clothed for about a hundred marks. Buyers and resellers came from across the country and the region.
World brands arrived in the city as single samples and left as millions of copies — so faithful, according to reporting at the time, that original and replica differed neither in cut nor in packaging.
What is left
Today there are far fewer factories and Novi Pazar jeans no longer carry their old fame, but production has not stopped: the plants that remain operate and export. For a visitor that means clothing is still bought directly from the maker, at prices larger cities cannot match.