CFP – Fashion and Démocracy (19-20th Centuries) – deadline 2024-11-30
Je me permets, à la demande d’une collègue historienne membre du conseil scientifique qui n’est pas abonnée à la liste, de vous faire suivre cet appel à communications car les organisatrices et organisateurs pensent que contemporanéistes et politistes sont susceptibles d’être intéressé·es.
Veuillez noter que je ne participe pas à l’organisation de cet événement et que je ne saurai répondre à aucune question le concernant. En cas de besoin, n’hésitez pas à écrire à Marjorie Meiss < marjorie.meiss-even@univ-lille.fr>.
Bien cordialement, Émilien Ruiz
*Call for Papers*
*for* *the International Conference*
*“FASHION AND DEMOCRACY (19-20TH CENTURIES)” *
Since ancient times western and non-western dress has been always subject to control and regulation by political powers through formal or informal institutions. Formal regulation took the shape of sumptuary laws, whilst informal institutions worked rather through a system of social rules. Even when sumptuary laws proved to be ineffective and were left unenforced in societies such as those of the pre-modern Europe – where societies were based on hierarchically structured social orders – dress (*l’apparence*) was anyway subject to social judgements of approval or disapproval. This does not mean that in 18th century Europe, including France, the Balkans or Japan, for example, populations did not enjoy some degree of liberty in choosing their way of dressing, but these choices were not yet an expression of a wholly free will.
We think that this expression of a free clothing choice appeared alongside the political system that we could call “liberal democracy” with its interactions with the mass society: a scenario that began to emerge between the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. It was in this framework that, side by side with the consolidation of civil and political rights, a real and free “right to fashion” also emerged, at least among those who could afford to do this, and thanks to a growing set of new consuming opportunities. It was within this context that we can interpret the “practice of fashion” as an expression of freedom.
It was not therefore by chance that dictatorships of the 20th century – Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy – tried to capture fashion in order to promote notions of a “national fashion”, whilst in Soviet Russia or Maoist China, political powers substituted fashion with uniforms and concepts of the unification of the “builders of communism”. In both cases this was a way to control the masses. In the second half of the 20th century another issue came into being – that of the potential conflict between fashion and religion, where the latter evokes, on the one side, the role played by theocratic countries and, on the other, the way democratic states deal with religious regulation of dress within their boundaries.
These remarks raise questions an international conference could effectively discuss. If it is true, on the one side, that the subjugation of fashion under dictatorships has been seen as a symbol of oppression, why, on the other, has fashion not been proposed as a synonym of freedom? How do societies “without fashion” look at fashion evolutions in western societies?
By the 1960s, fashion was being led, at least in London, by young fashion designers, mostly educated in state art schools, who had little interest in the design of the great Paris fashion houses, preferring a younger, cheaper, informal, democratic style of their own. Today we have instant Internet shopping. Has that created a democracy of fashion?
The discussions on these topics are very welcome at the conference “Fashion and Democracy”. The conference will be held at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia on *May 8 and 9, 2025.*
There is no fee to participate in the conference. Due to limited funding, the Organizing Committee encourages participants to seek funding opportunities from their institutions, especially for travel expenses.
The Scholarly committee of the conference includes Marco Belfanti (University of Brescia), Maude Bass-Krueger (University of Gent), Daniel Devoucoux (ETVA), Elke Gaugele (Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien), Karine Grandpierre (University of Sorbonne Paris-Nord), Aziza Gril-Mariotte (University of Aix-Marseille & Musée des Tissus et Arts décoratifs de Lyon), Petko Hristov (IEFSEM – BAS Sofia), Aude Le Guennec (The Glasgow School of Art), Jean-Pierre Lethuillier (University of Rennes-2), Marjorie Meiss (University of Lille), Eleni Mouratidou (University of Paris-Nanterre), Lou Taylor (University of Brighton).
The Organizing committee includes Marco Belfanti, Petko Hristov, Mila Maeva, Miglena Ivanova, Julia Popcheva, Radina Ilieva and Anton Angelov.
Requests for participation, including a title and a short summary (up to 300 words) *till **30.11.2024*, should be sent to the following e-mail:
marco.belfanti@unibs.it, hristov_p@yahoo.com
We are expecting you!
— *Émilien Ruiz* *Professeur assistant au CHSP*
27, rue Saint-Guillaume 75337 Paris cedex 07 Bureau : K. 130 (1 place Saint-Thomas) *https://www.sciencespo.fr/histoire/ <www.sciencespo.fr/histoire/>* | *http://e-ruiz.com/ <e-ruiz.com/>*