Fashion and Cultural Textiles

Museums have long collected garments as artifacts, but scholars now treat clothing as a living record of how bodies, identities, and social hierarchies are made visible and negotiated over time. Museology of fashion and cultural textiles draws on material culture studies, sociology, and anthropology to ask how a dress or a woven cloth carries meaning across the hands that made it, the bodies that wore it, and the institutions that preserved it. Globalization and digital media have sharpened urgent questions about who gets to define "heritage" when styles and techniques cross borders at speed, and how online archives or virtual exhibitions can represent embodied, tactile experience without flattening it. Researchers are actively debating how museums should handle provenance, sustainability, and the politics of display when the objects on their shelves encode both intimate personal histories and broader colonial legacies.

Works

137,584

Total citations

301,467

Keywords

FashionClothingMaterial CultureIdentitySociologyDigital Media