This international conference aims to examine the spatial dimension of the crafts associated with fashion and dress. In the wake of developments brought about by global history, it intends to turn its attention to the spatial dimension of fashion crafts. The recent spatial turn and the spread of data visualisation tools provide an opportunity to rethink fashion crafts. From modelling the workplaces of fashion designers from the past to the present day, to representing the flows, locations and spatial dynamics that characterize fashion professions on the scale of a street, a city or a continent, crafts and the making of fashion also shape landscapes just as much as they are shaped by territories and their physical and environmental characteristics. Continuing the debate on the forms of exhibition, museography and mediation, the issue of how these questions are reflected in museums will be a key area of study for this conference.

Argument

Following on from its first edition, which focused on fashion crafts over the longue durée, this second international conference aims to examine the spatial dimension of the crafts associated with fashion and dress. In the wake of developments brought about by global history, the Sorbonne Alliance Fashion, Material Knowledge and the Museum project intends to turn its attention to the spatial dimension of fashion crafts.

A typically French and even somewhat untranslatable expression, the notion of “savoir-faire” in France seems to refer to the traditional sets of specialist technical skills and know-how underpinning the fashion trades. This narrative however is predicated upon what is commonly understood as ‘the fashion system’, itself a cultural, social and economic construction invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often in relation to the great Parisian fashion houses.

The notion of space invites us to recalibrate our gaze and ask new questions about fashion, its actors, its sites and its dynamics – in space and time. Looking beyond the twentieth century, and beyond the European-centric prism that often dominates thinking about fashion and dress, the conference aims to question the traditional vision of fashion as a Western invention. By looking at clothing practices, textile crafts and the materials and resources specific to other regions of the world, the conference borrows from global history and examines the links and spatial dynamics between various centres and peripheries.

As our chronology, from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century, corresponds to the construction of empires and the persistence, beyond decolonisation, of their power dynamics, the conference also naturally borrows from decolonial and postcolonial studies. It will look at the appropriation, imposition or erasure of certain crafts, but also at the practices of misappropriation or subversion entailed by the mastery of these techniques and resources. Without taking anything away from the real and symbolic violence inherent to colonial (and post-colonial) situations, we will also wonder whether these craft productions may be seen as a kind of ‘third space’.

The notion of space also invites us to think about scale and consider the relative interactions between different scales — from the global and the local, which often need to be considered together, to the regional and rural in their interaction with both urban centres and more distant margins. The establishment of royal factories under the Ancien Régime in France, where specific skills were cultivated and organised from the centrality of the court, the Paris-Province dichotomy that sheds light on a number of exchange dynamics, such as the links between the Lyon silk production and Parisian couture, or the specialisation in different textile techniques in different regions of India, which exported them around the world, or very local textiles traditions in Japan, which were sometimes also designed for an international taste, all reflect the complex interplay of space and scale. 

The rural localities on whose skills the making of fashion depended are often conceived of in isolation from the places of fashionable consumption, whether it be Paris, London, Edo, Mexico City or Kinshasa. Yet we know that the technical knowledge and materials that contribute to the making of high fashion to this day are all undeniably global.

The movement of populations, due to commercial or colonial expansion, often leads to the circulation and transfer of technical knowledge, entailing processes of hybridisation and cross-fertilisation. Mapping the geographical and cultural trajectories of these hybridisations enables us to grasp the transnational identities of territories which may first appear as remote or peripheral. The emblematic example of the Indian cottons that the French region of Provence specialised in in the eighteenth century, and the production in rural Perche of fabric woven from North American cotton fibre in the nineteenth century, are just some of the many examples that link different continents, from Asia, America and Europe to Africa. Different types of spatial hierarchies are also superimposed, playing on different scales and calling into question any over-simplistic opposition that we might be tempted to make between centre and periphery. But the history of transfers and circulation is also sometimes one of failures, and studying these is instructive because skills and crafts sometimes seem intrinsically linked to particular territories and their peculiar hygrometric, geographical or climatic conditions. Space sometimes resists.

The recent spatial turn and the spread of data visualisation tools also provide an opportunity to rethink fashion crafts. From modelling the workplaces of fashion designers from the past to the present day, to representing the flows, locations and spatial dynamics that characterize fashion professions on the scale of a street, a city or a continent, crafts and the making of fashion also shape landscapes just as much as they are shaped by territories and their physical and environmental characteristics. Continuing the debate on the forms of exhibition, museography and mediation, the issue of how these questions are reflected in museums will be a key area of study for this conference. It will look at how these various geographies have shaped museum collections over time, and at the variety of know-how and actors made visible by a more material approach to fashion and dress, often inviting museums to go against the accepted narratives of fashion history.

Submission guidelines

Please send proposals (300 word max) together with a short biographical note

by July 15th

to :

• ariane.fennetaux@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr
• emilie.hammen@univ-paris1.fr

Scientific coordination

• Ariane Fennetaux - Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
• Emilie Hammen - Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne

Scientific committee

• Astrid Castres, EPHE
• Nick Rees Roberts, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle
• Camille Kovalevski, Université Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne
• Emmanuelle Garcin, Musée des Arts Décoratifs
• Anna Audo, Sorbonne Université
• Marine Kisie,l Palais Galliéra
• Josephine Basso, Lacroix Université de St Etienne