19th-century dress codes in the areas constituting present-day Slovenia were different for the urban bourgeoisie and for the peasantry, which used geographically distinct clothing patterns in each historical region of the area. These regional differences only converged in the closing decades of the 19th century. By that time, and in keeping with European trends generally, peasant motifs were incorporated in what the nation-building bourgeoisie considered a distinctively “national” dress style, and which was disseminated transregionally through associations such as the “reading rooms” (čitalnice).

These nationalizing trends, negotiating both the extraordinary local fragmentation of the incipient Slovenian cultural community and the fluid nature of folk practices, were mostly spread by amateurs, writers and politicians. This happened mostly in Ljubljana, the capital of Carniola, which, after the “Illyrian” intermezzo under Napoleonic rule, was gradually gaining a national importance as the “Slovenian capital”; with its advantageous trading position and comparative intellectual and economic proximity to the Habsburg heartland, Ljubljana provided a congenial ambience for cultural consciousness-raising among the emerging local intelligentsia; it was here that a centralizing Carniolian norm emerged for the  different interpretations and recycling of “folk culture”, outweighing regions like Lower Styria and Carinthia.

The word “costume” (kostum) for the traditional clothes used in theatre productions was linked very early with folk-inspired clothes. A 1789 review of Anton Tomaž Linhart’s play Županova Micka (“Mayer’s daughter Micka”) already used it, and into the 1840s the word denoted the traditional dress from the Carniolian region. In 1849 (with the revolutionary events of the previous year, including Matija Majar Ziljski’s first national programme Zedinjena Slovenija, “United Slovenia”, fresh in the memory) a theatrical review used a national rather than regional appellation, describing an actress as “speaking in a Slovenian language and dress”. The Carniolian region remained prototypical for what would come to be considered a nationally Slovenian costume, also when artistic taste changed from Romantic Realism into the Neo-Romantic fin-de-siècle. When a “Slovenian national costume” (slovenska narodna noša) was designed in the second half of the century, the Carniolian model recommended itself: the area was favoured by artists and writers (inspired, ultimately, by Rousseau and Herder) for idyllic evocations of the traditional peasantry, catering for a nostalgia that worked in tandem with the modernization processes of cities like Ljubljana as experienced by recently-urbanized nation-builders.

Most Slovenian traditional designs, as we understand the concept today, became a topic of traditional heritage preservation in the 20th century. The naive paintings illuminating the sides of beehive-boxes were highlighted as early as 1903 as valuable folk heritage; by 1911 these “beehive panels” (panjske končnice) were systematically collected. Folklore elements were introduced in graphic or interior design as a part of fin-de-siècle aesthetics, e.g. Ivan Jager’s interior of the National Café (Narodna Kavarna, 1898) in Ljubljana, or the interior of the Slovenian Painters’ Association Vesna in Vienna (1903-06). The symbolic meaning of national design, as shown in lacework, cradles or hayracks, reached wider audiences only at the time when it had already started to recede due to industrialization and modernization, especially in the interwar period.