Fashion and Cultural Textiles

Museums and archives have long treated clothing as artifact, but the museology of fashion and cultural textiles pushes further, asking how garments carry identity, embody social relations, and transmit cultural memory across time and borders. Scholars draw on material culture studies, sociology, and digital media to examine not just what people wear but how dress practices shape and are shaped by globalization, migration, and shifting ideas of selfhood. As collections expand to include synthetic fibers, fast fashion, and digitally designed garments, curators and researchers face genuine methodological questions about preservation, representation, and whose sartorial histories get institutionalized. Active debates concern how digital tools can extend access to fragile textile collections without flattening their tactile and embodied meanings, and how museums might reckon honestly with the colonial and economic histories woven into the objects they hold.

Works

138,523

Total citations

303,503

Keywords

FashionClothingMaterial CultureIdentitySociologyDigital Media