Pulling out the latest creations from Paris and Milan, the salesman tells his customer she looks divine in a striped Gucci suit. Is this Via Montenapoleone? Madison Avenue? No, it's a third-floor flat in a dingy communist-era apartment block in downtown Belgrade.
While hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees are returning to the chaos of Kosovo and tens of thousands of Serbs are fleeing the province, it is business as usual in the Serbian capital, where 79 days of NATO air strikes did not halt the brisk trade in clothes hot off the runways.
Even with key government ministries in bombed-out ruins roped off like crime scenes, there is still serious shopping to be done by appointment only, of course. A tall, wispy blonde with pencil-thin eyebrows opens the door. Unsmiling, she leads the visitors down the corridor in the direction of a man's voice. No, I can't take any more leather coats. I'm full up, the man I'll call "Boban" said, hanging up the telephone.
Racks of designer clothes adorn the four walls of what would have been the living room if these were normal times. But they are not. "I got into this line of work because of inflation," he said. In 1993, Yugoslavia, comprising Serbia and Montenegro, was rocked by astronomical inflation. The rate hit 330 million per cent for December of that year alone. "I used to work in restaurants but could not make a living," he said, adding that he now earns 5,000-6,000 deutschmarks (€2,556.46E3,067.75) a month.
He points to a chestnut-coloured cashmere Hermes blazer. Its proportions are perfect and the price tag says about £1,340 sterling. At Boban's price of DM 800, it is a steal. Literally.
"They are stolen from abroad," he said, without embarrassment. "The one thing that is important to me is that the goods are not from Yugoslavia. I don't break the laws of my country," he said. After a moment's thought, he added that he might have committed a few customs violations, but nothing on the scale of grand larceny. Boban is one of a handful in Belgrade who deal in high fashion from clothes to jewellery. They are nicknamed shaneri, Belgrade slang for thieves.
Strictly speaking Boban is not a thief. But he does buy stolen goods from thieves who have fanned out across Europe. "Switzerland and Germany are good. "Italy is the best - because it is more lenient with the law". Travelling on false passports, the thieves occasionally do get caught, but this worries Boban little as they always manage to get out of jail. "The law is more lenient when you have money. And they have money. Belgium and Austria should be avoided," he says. "And Greece is the most dangerous," he adds.
Boban has cast his net wide. Despite being cut off from the outside world for much of the past seven years due to a trade embargo imposed against Yugoslavia for its role in the country's violent disintegration, he receives shipments, he said. Last year US retailers claimed to lose $26 billion (€25.64 million) to theft, representing 1.72 per cent of total retail sales, according to a National Retailers Security Survey.
But Boban said theft was not always what it seemed. Often "burglaries" were actually insurance fraud, he said. "The owner just hands over the keys to the shop. And the thieves come and clean it out," he said. "Everybody's happy."
Browsing through the clothes, each item appears unique. It is rare to find the same item in a different size. While it is easy to steal in Italy - in 1996, the country recorded two million cases of theft - one drawback is the huge disparity in size. In comparison with the lanky Serbs, Italians are short and stocky. So Boban's clients are mostly women.
His customer list is a roster of Who's Who in Serbia, from popular singers, to the wife of an opposition leader, to the families of the country's highest-ranking politicians. The most important clients even get home delivery.
Some of these fashions may one day grace the visitors' gallery at the war crimes tribunal at The Hague. For some clients are the elite of the regime run by Slobodan Milosevic, Yugoslav president.
His clients always had money, Boban said, so he does not worry that Serbia's grim economic prospects will hurt business. "My doors are open regardless of political party affiliation or ethnic background," he said.
