Open Calls: ICOM Costume Annual Conference 5. - 8. October 2026
Museo del Traje, Madrid, ES
Deadlines: 12. & 20.06.2026

ICOM Costume Annual Conference in Madrid – Undressing the Institution: costume, fashion and textile collections, colonial histories, new museologies: CALL FOR PAPERS & CALL FOR TRAVEL GRANTS

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.

The global movement of textiles and dress through trade, empire, and cross-cultural exchange offers particularly rich ground for reflection. Consider the cochineal dye harvested in the Americas that transformed European textile production; the Spanish morion helmet whose silhouette echoes in the Peruvian montera; the vast circulation of materials and aesthetics across the Habsburg world. These histories of exchange – coercive and creative alike – remind us that the collections we steward are not static national or institutional possessions but nodes in long, entangled networks that stretched across continents. Making those networks visible is part of what this meeting asks us to consider.

How can costume, fashion and textile museums become spaces where divided histories are acknowledged and more equitable futures imagined? How do we address questions of cultural appropriation – of aesthetics, knowledge, and material culture – embedded in our institutional foundations? And what does it mean to practise a new museology in the storeroom, not just in the seminar room?

We welcome proposals that are practical and conceptual, grounded in case studies and driven by argument. We are looking for contributions from across the full range of roles and institutions: curators, conservators, researchers, educators, community practitioners and independent scholars alike.

Deadline Call for papers: 12.06.2026
Deadline Travel grants: 20.06.2026

More information: costume.mini.icom.museum/