Fashion and Cultural Textiles

Fashion and cultural textiles, as studied within museology and the broader humanities, examines how clothing functions not merely as fabric and form but as a carrier of identity, memory, and social meaning across time and place. Scholars in this area draw on material culture studies, sociology, and anthropology to understand how garments encode power, belonging, and transformation — from colonial-era dress codes to contemporary fast fashion's global supply chains. A growing body of work asks how digital media and virtual exhibition practices are reshaping the way textile heritage is preserved, interpreted, and made accessible to publics who may never handle the physical object. Central unresolved questions include how museums can ethically represent non-Western dress traditions without flattening their complexity, and how accelerating globalization both homogenizes fashion systems and provokes renewed interest in localized, craft-based textile knowledge.

Works

140,829

Total citations

305,724

Keywords

FashionClothingMaterial CultureIdentitySociologyDigital Media