19/05/2026
CALL FOR PAPERS
ICOM Costume 2026 Annual Meeting, Museo del Traje, Madrid
Deadline: 12 June 2026
-————————
Un******ng the Institution: Costume, Fashion and Textile Collections, Colonial Histories, New Museologies
Costume, fashion and textile collections sit at a productive contradiction. They hold some of the most intimate and universal records of human experience: records of how people dressed, moved, mourned, celebrated, and identified themselves across time and place. And yet the institutions that house them were shaped by histories of empire, colonialism and ethnographic classification that determined what was collected, how it was described and whose material culture was deemed worthy of preservation. The systems of cataloguing and indexing that still structure many collections carry the imprint of those origins, encoding hierarchies between “fashion” and “craft,” “Western dress” and “ethnic costume,” “art” and “artefact.” They continue to shape what we display, how we interpret, whose stories we tell.
This meeting invites participants to sit with that tension, to unpick the language of catalogues, question provenance, rethink taxonomies, and, crucially, to share new approaches: community-led collecting, collaborative interpretation, exhibition strategies that refuse to reproduce old power relations.
Proposals should include:
– A title and abstract of no more than 300 words.
– A short biographical note (up to 150 words) for each presenter.
– ICOM Membership if you’re member (ICOM national committee and number for ICOM Members)
– An indication of the sub-theme(s) addressed
– Language of presentation (Official ICOM languages are accepted: English, French, or Spanish)
Deadline for submissions: 12 June 2026
Please send proposals to: [email protected]
Notification of acceptance: 8 July 2026
.espana
